


Brighter Futures

by Afalstein, bissek



Series: Recruitment Drive [11]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Noir (Anime), The Dresden Files - Jim Butcher
Genre: Anime, Crossover, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Marvel Cinematic Universe Phase Two Compliant, Marvel Universe, Multiple Crossovers, Recruitment, Recruitment Drive
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-05
Updated: 2015-08-05
Packaged: 2018-04-13 01:32:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 22,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4502664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Afalstein/pseuds/Afalstein, https://archiveofourown.org/users/bissek/pseuds/bissek
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Based on Afalstein's Recruitment Drive series. Co-written by Afalstein. Recruiting one ex-cop should have been an easy job, but instead May discovers that there are dangers out there that SHIELD never even knew existed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Brighter Futures

 

May landed the plane and taxied it to the hanger she'd arranged to be available to store it for the duration of her mission to Chicago. Powering down the engines, she walked back to talk with Skye, who had joined her for technical support (And, May personally felt sure, to avoid Dr House, who had been drawing her blood at a near-constant rate since his induction into SHIELD).

"Any more information on the objective?" She asked.

Skye looked up at her. "These chairs back here are killer. Why couldn't we have taken the Bus?"

"The Bus is reserved for the Director's use and specialized missions." May frowned. "Any information on the objective?"

Sky sighed and flipped her laptop around. "An odd one." She reported. "Not sure what drew our attention to her, she seems to be a very capable ex-cop, but nothing more. Though I guess there was that NYPD detective last week..."

"Agent Beckett has done some prior work with us, and Agent Castle..." May struggled a little with this one, "...is the son of an old friend of the Director." She had grave personal misgivings about that particular recruitment.

Skye grinned but did not comment, instead turning back to the laptop. "Anyway, there was this 'Special Investigation' squad she led in Chicago for several years. But even that—she did a good job with it, but it's not like major crimes or SWAT or anything. To be honest I can't even find out what they DO."

May frowned and looked at the laptop. "We may have worked with her before."

"Really?" Skye glanced at her. "There was something in the SHIELD database—some video of her shooting this enormous wolf-thing. Was she an agent?"

"Not like that." May shook her head. "Most major cities have at least one 'Special Investigations' squad... they're the ones we usually deal with when there's a meta on the loose."

Skye's face gained sudden interest. "Ah. So 'special' here means 'weird stuff,' huh? What do they usually handle when metas aren't around?"

That brought May up short. She had never honestly considered what a 'Special Investigations' squad would do when there weren't Gifted or Aliens involved. "Delusionary episodes, I suppose." She finally offered. "People who see ghosts, for instance."

"Remind me again why SHIELD doesn't believe in ghosts and psychics."

"There's no evidence for them. And before you say that last year we didn't have evidence of Norse gods either, let me remind you that there's also no evidence of the flying spaghetti monster." May allowed herself a quiet smile as Skye subsided. "Just because one legend is true doesn't automatically mean all legends are. Now. The target?"

Skye sighed. "No red flags on her discharge for the police force. Seems clean enough. I still haven't found anything on this Brighter Future Society that she's currently working for, or what she's doing for them—they don't even have a website."

"What kind of charity doesn't even have a website?" May frowned.

"I... doubt it's a charity." Skye answered, shooting her a significant look. "Here." A set of images filled the screen. "Their headquarters is a freaking castle, and I mean that literally. It's like they found some old medieval fortress somewhere in Europe and had it shipped over to Chicago. And the guy they have watching the door looks like he could snap Ward in half without breaking a sweat," Skye reported.

May examined the clip of footage that the rookie agent displayed. She idly noted that Skye was right about the security guard - apart from some footage of Thor in action, she'd never seen anyone that impressively built. Still... "He shouldn't be a problem." May noted, heading for the door.

"Ah, you're not going to find her there." Skye interposed, stopping May short. "I caught her and a group of her coworkers leaving their offices on a traffic camera half an hour ago."

May grunted with annoyance, turning again to look at the video. Her eyes narrowed suddenly. "Their body language... This isn't a business meeting they're heading to." She reported. "They look like they're expecting a fight. Can you track where they're going?"

Skye raised an eyebrow but obediently flipped the laptop around again. "Already on it. Something to do with work, I'm guessing—it's not lunchtime and it's too early for them to be going home for the day." Skye's fingers rattled the keys. "Let's see, I last had them headed towards Lake Michigan..."

"That doesn't narrow it down much." May crossed her arms. "Chicago's a major shipping hub. The dock district is huge."

"Huh... weird."

"What?"

"There's a block by the docks where every single traffic camera is malfunctioning." Skye reported, frowning at her screen. "Like every. single. one." She glanced up at May. "Bit unlikely for a coincidence, hm?"

May gave a short nod. "Keep me posted on their movements, and any police bulletins in the area. I'd rather not have to tell Coulson we lost Karrin Murphy." She marched off in the direction of the armory.

-

"Look out, Murphy!"

Karrin Murphy, once of the Chicago Police Department, ducked blindly and felt a scaly claw go whistling over her head. She shoved the stock of her shotgun back and was rewarded with gurgling croak of pain.

The Fomor were back. Privately Murphy suspected that the reason they kept returning was because if they stopped, their leaders would be admitting that they couldn't establish a foothold in the human city closest to their capital, which would be seen as a sign of weakness both within their court and to everyone else in the paranormal world.

Murphy had picked up on the disappearances after a few days. The Fomor definitely liked their twisted mind-slaves. Though she'd have liked to have more people available, Dresden and Butters were both out knighting for their respective superiors, and Molly was likewise unavailable. So Murphy had called together what she could, determined to make do with what she had.

The Alphas had taken point, with Murphy leading the others close behind. They'd quickly felled the first Fomor with a steel-jacketed bullet and two angry werewolves, but as it'd fallen it'd let out a loud scream, and then all hell'd broken loose.

"Murph! Up front!" Murphy's head shot up at the call, and she saw what the caller had recognized—a cage ahead where a crowd of blank-faced humans was staring out at them listlessly. And, less happily, the remaining Fomor on a walkway above it, readying an attack on Murphy and her party.

"Take cover!" Murphy roared, and dove behind a convenient crate as explosives and acid-filled bombs rained down.

Murphy huddled up against the back of the crate and took stock of the situation. This was bad. The Fomor had the high ground, and what little cover her group had wouldn't last long under that salvo. But they couldn't exactly return fire, with such a thick bombardment...

Suddenly, there was the chatter of an automatic rifle.

Murphy blinked. That sounded military—nothing like what her people (or the Fomor, obviously) had.

Another burst of gunfire. The bombardment was faltering, and Murphy risked a quick glance up.

An Asian woman, clad in leather and carrying an assault rifle, was fighting the Fomor on the walkway. She wasn't anyone Murphy knew. Had Marcone or Raith sent her?

Whoever she was, she was good. She gunned down three of the Fomor before they even realized she was there. One started to turn, but was rifle-butted in the face and then kicked off the walkway before it could pose a threat.

It was all the intervention Murphy and the others needed. As the Alphas bounded forward to deal with the downed Fomor, Murphy leveled her gun at the walkway and began to clear it. Not that it needed much—the Asian woman had nearly sliced through the last of them already.

Pushing herself to her feet, Murphy gave a quick glance around. The warehouse looked clear—already some of her colleagues were breaking open the cage and letting out the prisoners. Will came up to her. "Same as usual?"

Murphy nodded, pulling out her phone. "The police are going to be called in by an anonymous tip about another white slavery ring shortly - they'll see to it that the prisoners are given medical treatment and get home." She gave the warehouse another scan. "Make sure you guys check all the rooms—I don't want us missing anyone."

"Got it." Will nodded, jerking his head at some of the other Alphas. "Who's the chick in leather, by the way?"

"No idea." Murphy watched as the woman in question dropped off the walkway to the floor below. "Maybe Marcone hired himself a second Valkyrie." Pushing past Will, she approached the woman. "Thanks for the assist."

The woman held up a hand to signal silence. Her other hand was at her ear, and she appeared to be talking to someone. "Yes, Director." She said. "An 084." Her gaze scanned the bodies lying on the ground. "A LOT of 084's, actually. Trust me, you're going to want to be on hand for this one. Yes sir." Her hand dropped and she looked up. "Lieutenant Karrin Murphy?" She asked.

"Not for some time now." Murphy replied.

"Agent Melinda May, of SHIELD. I'd like to have a word with you."

-

"Frog people." Coulson repeated.

"I'm serious, Director." May's gait was tight and controlled, and her mouth was set in a thin line.

"I believe that." Coulson nodded. The two of them were walking down one of Chicago's seedier alleys. "In fact, as long as I've known you, I've never known you to be anything BUT serious. If I had to name a particular flaw with you, it's probably that you're TOO serious. I'm just having a little difficulty understanding how an army of frog people disappears."

May let out a long breath through her nose. "As am I."

Coulson shrugged, apparently dropping the subject. "Well, perhaps this Murphy can shed light on it. You say she appears talented?"

"Far more than her record led to suggest." May nodded. "Not just in assault and combat, but also in tactical knowledge and coordination. You may want to consider her in a leadership role."

"Hmm." Coulson nodded, but his face was doubtful. "Where are we meeting her again?"

"Neutral ground."

"Which means...?"

"She seemed to think that was enough." May shrugged. "I was eventually able to get her to provide a specific location—this pub." She nodded at the door ahead of them.

"Huh." Coulson said, pushing open the door. "Any idea why she thought it'd be so..." His voice died away.

On one of the support pillars in the pub was a large sign with "ACCORDED NEUTRAL TERRITORY" printed on it in obvious letters.

"I have a theory." May suggested.

"It basically means that anyone is welcome here, so long you understand that all disputes stop at the threshold." Murphy said, emerging from some corner. She pointed at the sign. "If the Red Skull was sitting at one of the tables here, you would be expected to drink your beer and mind your own business, and he would be expected to do the same."

"And what happens if you break that rule?" May inquired.

"You earn the enmity of every single group that's signed onto the Unseelie Accords, and then Mac won't sell you any of his beer." Murphy shrugged.

"Un... seelie Accords." Coulson repeated.

Murphy eyed him. "And you are?"

"Coulson. Phil Coulson." He extended his hand.

" **Director** Phil Coulson." May amended.

Murphy looked from one to the other, then shrugged. "C'mon." She made her way toward the back. "Will's got a table for us."

They followed her to the back. The more May glanced around, the more troubled she grew. There was something decidedly not-normal about this place and its patrons.

Seated at an empty table in the back was one of the young men she'd seen at the warehouse. He nodded at them. "Hey." His nose twitched ever so slightly.

"Will Borden." Murphy indicated, sliding into a chair. "Leader of the Alphas." She nodded at the glasses already on the table. "Drink up."

May sat but did not drink. Coulson took a sip, then uttered a short exclamation. "I suddenly understand the second part of that penalty." He said, gazing at the glass reverently. "Any chance he sells cases?"

Murphy smiled politely. "You mind if we get on with this?"

"Right, sorry." Coulson shook his head and set his glass down. "So. Frog men."

May winced.

"The Fomor." Murphy nodded. "They have a major base in Lake Michigan, so they keep coming out trying to abduct people they can twist into slaves. They've been attacking Chicago for the past three years."

May and Coulson both blinked. "Sorry?" Coulson managed.

"Three years." Murphy repeated, taking a sip of her beer. "They're a real pain in the ass."

"I don't suppose that SHIELD has a supply of depth charges we could use to get rid of them once and for all?" Will suggested.

Slowly Coulson shook his head. "A year ago we probably could have arranged for a destroyer to 'accidentally' lose some charges overboard, but we're sort of short on depth charges at the moment. And destroyers. If we'd known..."

Murphy's eyes narrowed. "Aren't you guys supposed to be some super-secret, ultra-on-top-of-things paramilitary group? And yet you've never heard of the Fomor?"

"Three years ago we were kind of dealing with this whole 'Norse gods on earth' situation." Coulson explained.

Murphy and Will both snorted and exchanged glances. Apparently something about that struck them as funny.

"Look, exactly how much do you know about the supernatural world?" Murphy leaned forward. "The Fomor, okay, but they're comparatively new. What about the war with the Red Court before that?" She looked from one blank face to another. "Really? Went on for about a decade, caused all the instability in Central America... really, nothing? What about the Denarians? No? The Black Court scourge that was based in Chicago roughly ten years ago?" A slow look of horror crossed her face. "Having to tell you about the pub... do you even know what the Unseelie Accords ARE?"

"Losing so much respect for the US government right now." Will muttered.

"Technically we're an international force." Coulson raised a finger.

"Dear god..." Murphy hid her head in her hands. "You guys never even knew..." Slowly her head raised. "Although, on second thought, that actually makes me feel better than if you'd known about all of that and just sort of... let it happen."

"I take it that's what the Special Investigation squad usually deals with, then." May observed. At Murphy's weary nod she frowned. "There was nothing in your reports about that..."

"Because saying 'a vampire did it' doesn't usually go over well." Murphy rolled her eyes.

"And the Brighter Future Society?" May asked.

"The Brighter Future Society is a coalition of civilians who are aware of the supernatural, minor practitioners, and the local mob who have banded together to protect this city." Murphy answered. She sounded like she was reciting from a pamphlet.

"What about funding?"

"We get money from this family of vampires that feed on sex." Will snorted. "We're protecting people from the weird. Isn't that kind of supposed to be your job?"

May coughed and leaned toward Coulson. "He has a point." She muttered in his ear.

Coulson gave the smallest nod. "Forget point, he's got a full stab wound." He muttered back. "We never even suspected this entire society. SHIELD was supposed to be on the lookout for weird stuff—it's how we found mutants."

"So how did we always get mutants, but never magicians?"

Coulson slowly shook his head. "There must have been a cover-up somewhere. HYDRA?"

"If it'd been them, they'd be all over this community." May pointed out.

"Maybe..." Coulson blinked suddenly, his face filling with a new idea. "Maybe that's why we never knew. Maybe someone in the magic community knew about HYDRA, and hid them from SHIELD because of it."

"That would be extremely difficult." May shook her head.

"What does SHIELD want with me, anyway?" Murphy broke into their little conference.

Coulson turned back to the table and gave a quick smile. "To make things right."

Murphy and Will looked confused, so May elaborated. "We want you to join SHIELD." She explained. "Help us build it back."

Murphy snorted, and Will actually laughed. "After telling us how completely inept you guys are?" He asked.

"Exactly." Coulson nodded. "Obviously, this is a world we need to know more about. Also obviously, you know more than us."

"That's not saying much." Murphy pointed out.

"Need to start somewhere." Coulson shrugged. "Besides, as you just said, you're practically doing SHIELD's job already. Who better to teach us how to do it?"

"Oh? And why should we help?" Will folded his arms. "Clearly we've been doing fine without you."

Coulson shrugged. "Doesn't mean you couldn't use help."

"Last year, HYDRA picked up a 'minor practitioner' and used him to make a super-soldier serum." May interposed. She wasn't totally sure whether Scorch counted as a magician or a gifted, but it wasn't the time to check. "We didn't realize the danger he was in until he was taken, and weren't able to find him until it was too late. He went insane and exploded." May was gratified to see the look on Will's face. "Clearly, we need to be able to find minor practitioners and protect them before HYDRA gets to them, and uses whatever they take from their dead bodies to make more weapons."

"So there's that." Coulson smiled. "You're clearly the sort that looks out for more than just himself. You may not need us, but others do."

May could not help glancing at her boss in admiration. She knew Fury'd chosen him for a reason, but his ability to connect with the good in people still amazed her.

Murphy was notably quiet. She seemed to be considering what they had said. "What do you have in mind?" She said at last.

There was a short pause as Coulson seemed to think the question over. They were in uncharted waters here, this sort of thing hadn't even been on the table when they walked into the pub. "Information, at least." He said at last. "We need to be able to understand what's going on. Is there a way we can learn when things are going on so that we can try to do something about it?"

Murphy paused to think. "There might be. I can get in touch with a friend who owns a magical database that can interact with a computer without breaking it."

A blink from Coulson. "I'm sorry... breaking it?"

"Magic and technology don't mix." Will offered. "Surprise."

"And that would be why every traffic camera near the Fomor base was broken?" May asked.

Murphy nodded. "I'll have him send you an overview of the various powers of the magical world and what you need to know to survive in it. There's also the Paranet - an association of minor practitioners around the world who have banded together for their own protection. If anyone in the group suddenly goes missing, they'd be the first to know." She gave a sudden shrug. "Some might even be up for working for you."

"Murph..." Will gave a low growl.

"They can't defend themselves against humans, Will. If they try, they might end up killing someone, and then the Council will send the Wardens to kill _them_." Murphy shot back. "They're going to need someone, and we can't trust the White Court on this."

Coulson was clearly puzzled (And a little worried about this 'Council' and their 'Wardens'), but he hid it well. "And you?" He asked. "Clearly we're going to have to add a 'Special Investigations' division to SHIELD... keeping track of the supernatural, coordinating with members of the magical community." He raised his eyebrows. "Going to need people to help with it."

"I'll... think about it." Murphy rose abruptly with a sigh. "I've got responsibilities here too, you realize."

"Of course." Coulson nodded, and handed her a card. "You can use a phone, I take it?"

"Both of us can. Most minor practitioners can use cell phones and computers without them breaking down too often. It's only when they get into the upper levels that things like that happen regularly."

"Call that number if you decide to help." Coulson smiled. His face suddenly filled with a new thought. "Actually, maybe there's something you can help with." He reached into his pocket and pulled out the photograph of a man. "Someone who came up on our radar recently—Stephen Strange. HYDRA's apparently interested in him, but we can't figure out why. The only clue we have is the name 'Rashid.' Any connection to your people at all?"

Murphy glanced at the photo but shook her head. "Sorry, never seen him before. He might be in the deeper magical world, though... my connections only go so far."

"Ah." Coulson pocketed the photo again. "Sorry, thought it was worth a try."

May wrote down some information on a napkin. "Have your friend send the information to this site. Make sure you send it all at once - the site will delete itself after relaying it to us. HYDRA has a very nasty surveillance program in place, and this is the only way to slip a file transfer under its radar." It had taken the combined efforts of Skye, Root and Finch over the course of a month to set up the encryption protocols necessary to pull that off, and even then they couldn't guarantee that Samaritan wouldn't notice something was up and start investigating if the protocol was used twice from the same website.

Murphy took the napkin and left, Billy trailing behind. May turned to Coulson. "A 'Special Investigations' division? We barely have the people for one division now."

"Squad, or section then." Coulson shook his head as picked up the beer again. "We need to do something. This is a gaping blind spot in our intelligence. Especially if HYDRA is already on the trail." He took out the photo and frowned at it again.

May gave a reluctant nod. "Do you think that's why the Machine gave us her number?" She suggested. "So we'd find out about this?"

"Don't know how even the Machine could know about this." Coulson shook his head. "Apparently these people - or at least the movers and shakers among these people - wreck surveillance systems just by being around them. Unless it was through this friend Murphy mentioned. Still." Coulson shrugged. "Who knows? I'm past trying to guess what that program knows and doesn't know." He paused to sip from his beer, frowned at seeing it was empty, and looked at May's glass. "You going to drink that, or...?"

May rolled her eyes, picked up the glass, and downed it in one gulp. "We should get back to the plane." She said, standing.

While Coulson was haggling with Mac about buying a few extra cases of the beer, May noted Murphy off to the side, talking to someone on her cell phone. She caught a few words of the conversation as it ended.

"... and for God's sake, don't include _anything_ about Ivy."

-

Skye was looking at the plane's computer when they arrived.

"We just got a data packet on a secured channel from someone calling himself Bob the Skull. It's... large." She reported.

"Murphy said she'd be having a friend send us an overview of what we need to handle supernatural cases. That must be it." May told her.

"An overview?" Skye looked skeptical. "It's going to take two or three people just to look through this stuff. If this is an overview, we're going to need a whole new division to get a more detailed version."

Coulson grinned at May triumphantly, who just rolled her eyes. "Try to look through it on the flight back. Oh, and let me know if you see anything in there about somebody named Ivy."

"Ivy?"

"Someone that the Brighter Future Society doesn't want SHIELD to know about. Which means that she's probably someone important." May left for the front of the plane.

-

They had nearly arrived in Malta when Skye came up to the front.

"You'll be interested to know that there ARE such things as psychics." She said smugly. "The reason SHIELD's never found one before is because reading people's minds is apparently a capital felony under wizard law, so most of them get their heads cut off before they can do anything that would cause them to pop up on our radar. And that's not the strangest thing in the files by a long shot.

"Did you know that the Asgardians are running a private security firm in Oslo?"

\------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

A/N: A lot of situations in The Dresden Files are bad enough or strange enough that SHIELD, as the only government organization in the world that openly acknowledges that there is weird stuff out there that defies most rational explanation, should have been interested in, but they never show (Because Marvel Comics exists in the canon Dresdenverse - Harry is an avid Spider-man fan). In a world where both do exist, the most likely reaction to SHIELD finally showing up would probably be on the order of 'Where were you when we needed you?'

 

The Archive is almost certainly _the_ single most dangerous figure in the Dresdenverse from the perspective of SHIELD and HYDRA. Ivy is just a teenaged girl, but she literally knows everything that has been written (Both physically and electronically) by anyone, anywhere, _ever_ , including every single piece of classified data in existence. That would make her either the ultimate security risk or an instant game breaker, depending on whether she's enemy or ally, and neither side would be able to trust in the fact that her purpose as the keeper of mankind's knowledge requires her absolute neutrality. That's why Murphy doesn't want them to know about her.

 

Special thanks goes out to Afalstein, and not just for creating the Recruitment Drive series. I have been sending him advance copies of my contributions from the start to ensure that my additions fit in with his general vision of where the story as a whole will be going, and making revisions based on his comments. His input this time around was significant enough that I consider him to be a co-author for this chapter, instead of just being a pre-reader.


	2. Chapter 2

I woke up when I felt the ripples hit the island.

Don't get me wrong, being the sole caretaker of a massive magical island prison responsible for holding in the most terrible monsters of several dimensions has its downsides, but the bond I had with the island itself was still pretty neat-o. I could feel every grass rustling in the breeze, I could sense every beetle crawling on every tree (and wasn't that just a little bit creepy), and I could feel the waves lapping against the sand of the shore.

Most particularly, I could feel where the waves were irregular, where they were coming in just a little faster than normal, where the water had been disturbed. And I knew what that meant.

There are only two kinds of people who visit a place like Demonreach, largely because the island tends to discourage every other kind. The one kind is the sort most people would expect... friendly folks who know about you and your island and are dropping in for a nice visit. The other kind is the sort I expect... vast eldritch horrors looking to jump-start Armageddon by cracking open the island and unleashing its nightmares on an unsuspecting world.

Hey, if your life was anything like mine, that's what you'd expect too.

I like to think I'm as optimistic as the next guy, but I made sure to grab my leather duster, staff, pentacle, and Winchester shotgun before I hurried down to the dock. Anything that could get past the island's already-severe defenses wouldn't be greatly deterred by a shotgun, but it was often surprising to see the effect of a solid round of buckshot on even the nastiest of the nasty.

I needn't have worried. As I crested the hill, I saw the familiar shape of the ancient Water Beetle chugging valiantly toward land. Aboard would probably be my brother Thomas, and the ceremonial pizza that he always brought to our little picnics.

As I watched, a blonde head appeared on deck and waved at me. My heart did a little skip that had probably nothing to do with anticipatory cholesterol imbalance, and I waved back. Karrin. She hadn't been coming out to the island recently, and Thomas had only replied evasively that "she's busy."

Which of course wasn't the sort of thing a confident, self-assured manly man like myself might take the wrong way and agonize over. Nope. Not me. Not a trace of Denialitis in my veins. It's not like a long-distance relationship had ever gone wrong before.

But hey, she was here now. All that worrying was in the past.

Even so, I frowned. There was something... off about the boat. Something I couldn't put my finger on. Not anything magical, so much... my Power wasn't picking up anything wrong with it. But on a deeper level, one I didn't even know I had... I could sense that something really strange and bizarre was going on that boat.

A balding, middle-aged man in a suit came out on the deck next to Karrin and peered out at me.

I shuddered. Creepy.

"So you're Harry Dresden." Balding-and-middle-aged stuck out his hand to shake mine. "Pleasure to finally meet you."

I gave his hand a short, curt shake. No sense in not being polite, after all. "Finally?" I asked with a raised eyebrow.

The man gave a little shrug. "Everyone kept telling me I should talk to you, but no one would tell me anything about you or how to get in touch with you."

I sized up the man. He wasn't anyone I recognized, which wasn't in itself odd, but I know a lot of the major players in the magical realms and Chicago, and this man wasn't any of them. He was somewhere between Murphy and Thomas in height, and fit without being really built. I still wasn't getting any sort of power-sense off of him, so he wasn't a practitioner of any sort. His suit wasn't expensive, which meant he wasn't one of Marcone's lieutenants, but it wasn't cheap either, so he wasn't one of his goons either.

And he smiled a lot, which made him immediately suspicious to me.

Put simply, he was bizarrely ordinary, the sort of person who didn't hang around with Karrin or Thomas, didn't come out to Demonreach, and didn't have a feel that tickled at the back of my head like an itch that wouldn't go away.

But Murphy was just standing there beside him, grinning ear to ear and looking from one to the other of us like she was checking to see if either of us had sprouted horns yet.

"My name's Phil, by the way." He must have noticed me giving him the once-over. "Phil Coulson."

"Good to meet you." I didn't quite cover the growl in my voice. He didn't seem to catch it, but Murphy sure did. She sent me a death glare and I sighed internally. Right, right. Be nice.

I directed my attention to a less frustration-inducing target. Comparatively less, anyway. "Is that it, Thomas?"

"Just about." My vampire half-brother came out of the boat and laid the last set of cases on the dock. "Should see you through the week. I brought that set of pots you mentioned, so you should be able to heat up your soup."

"Yay." I said, staring at the case full of soup cans. Hells Bells, but I was tired of beef-and-vegetable. Of course, I could always take the Way to Chicago and pick up some other food, but the island got cranky if I did that too often, and it could be rather taxing (That didn't mean I was going to stop doing it though. Those shopping trips were my only chance to visit Maggie, and even if she was better off being raised by Michael rather than me, I was _going_ to be a part of my daughter's life, no matter what). So it was soup for most meals, which quickly got old. I had grave misgivings about how much heating up the soup would alter that. At some point in the near future I really needed to work out how to use my powers as the Winter Knight to create a good-sized icebox. Then I could stock up on more substantial but perishable things and not have to eat most of my meals from a can. My last attempt had resulted in five pounds of perfectly good steak becoming spectacularly freezer burned within ten seconds, and then shattering like glass when I took it out. "And the pizza?"

Thomas froze. He looked at Murphy. Her eyes were wide, her mouth very still. Coulson looked from one to the other of them, as if puzzled.

I let out a loud, dismal groan. This day could NOT get worse.

Then my brother broke into a snicker, and I realized how much I hated him.

Murphy started laughing, and even Coulson let out a chuckle or two. "On the boat." Thomas grinned, still sniggering his hopelessly smarmy head off. "I'll go and get it." He turned toward the cabin, "We actually brought two this time."

I blinked and immediately took back every evil thing I'd ever said about my brother. "Two?"

"Yeah." He said, reappearing with two boxes. "Enough for all of us." He nodded at Coulson.

I took back the takeback. "Oh."

"What do you call this place, anyway?" Coulson asked, glancing around.

I couldn't help it. "Whatsup."

My brother groaned, and Murphy's lingering chuckles flattened into a sigh. "Harry..."

Oh, sure, when my vampire brother plays a cool trick involving a man's sole source of sustenance it's one thing, but when I make a classy pun on classic joke, that's lame. Sounds fair.

Coulson's forehead crinkled in a satisfying manner. "Island Whatsup?" He turned to study me. "Not exactly catchy."

"No..." Murphy groaned, kneading her forehead. "He's talking about the... wharf." She groaned again, seeing that Coulson still didn't get it. "The marina. The port. The wooden thing you're standing on."

"The dock." I interposed, grinning maliciously at Murphy. She shook her head at me.

"Whatsup... Dock." Coulson tried it out. "Damn." He turned to Thomas. "I knew we should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque."

Thomas isn't much one for the classics. "Huh?"

I laughed despite myself. Okay, so this guy wasn't all bad. ""You won't find this place on any map or Google Search," I told him, slapping him on the back and leading him down the dock. "So technically it doesn't have an official name. But it's called Demonreach."

"Sounds... friendly." Coulson observed.

I grinned as we reached the end of the dock. "It's not. But as far as I can tell, there are no demons on the island." Under, I wasn't going to guess. I still had no idea of half the prisoners I was supposed to be guarding in "The Well" really were.

"Oh, Harry!" Karrin called to me as Coulson was about to step off. "Is the island angry at all today?"

Coulson's foot froze inches above the ground. "Is the island...?"

"No, no, it's fine." I called back to her. "Shouldn't mind a few visitors." I stepped off first, just in case, and got a sense for the land. Yes, Demonreach was feeling mellow—or at least not actively malevolent.

Coulson remained hesitating at the end of the dock until both Thomas and Murphy had pushed past him and stepped onto the ground. "Come on, Coulson." Murphy called back derisively. "It won't bite. Not if Dresden says it won't."

"So, you actually know Captain America." I said, through a mouthful of pizza. At his nod, I shrugged and licked some grease off my fingers. "Big deal. I know Santa Claus."

Coulson lifted his own slice from the other side of the pizza. "I also used to work with Thor."

"I still work with Odin." Who was technically the same person as Santa Claus, but that wasn't something I particularly needed to share at the moment. "The real Odin, not your alien-god knock-off."

"Harry." Murphy and Thomas practically said together.

"Could you not be an ass for once?" Thomas asked.

I just shrugged. "Authority figures bring out the worst in me."

Actually, I was having a pretty good time. Coulson had a surprisingly good sense of humor for someone in a suit, and also a surprisingly good knowledge of pop culture. Before I'd even realized we'd started, he and I had been trading quips for almost half an hour, with Thomas throwing in an occasional jibe and Murphy sitting back and shaking her head at us. Sure, he was a representative of a shadowy government organization that had apparently almost assassinated everyone in the country while I was on the island, but once you got past that, he wasn't really a bad guy.

"Uh, actually," Coulson raised his hand. "I'm not an authority figure. Not anymore. Sort of a fugitive right now."

Damnit. I was trying to hate this Coulson guy, but he wasn't making it easy.

"And actually, that's one of the things I wanted to talk to you about." Coulson leaned forward. "See, SHIELD's been always sort of on the fence about whether the Thor we know was actually a god, or just an alien. And now that we know about the Asgardians operating out of Oslo..."

I looked at Murphy, who shrugged. "They're not exactly subtle."

"...it's just made things even more confusing." Coulson shrugged. "I was hoping you could help us out with that."

I frowned. "Sorry. I've seen the newsreels, but I've never met Thor, or Loki, either in the real world OR in the Nevernever..."

"Sorry... Nevernever?"

"Faerie realm." Murphy supplied. "Sort of an interdimensional cosmos of magic."

"Ah."

"Basically, I've nothing to compare it to." I shrugged. "They could be the same people, but I wouldn't know them if I met them. The only one of the Norse gods I've actually met is Odin."

"And we have no footage of our alien Odin." Coulson frowned. "I see."

"It was a big to-do in the magical community when we saw New York." I offered. It was actually a really interesting question, and one that bigger minds than mine had wondered about, so I could understand Coulson's frustration. "Some people said Odin's little boys were drumming up business for their dad's security firm, others said that mortals were impersonating the gods and ought to be punished for it."

"Don't you have someone you can ask?" Coulson frowned. "Say, Odin?"

I chuckled without humor. "Here's the thing about the fae, Phil. They can't give a straight answer. They can't lie, either, but they have this pathological fear of straightforwardness."

"Ah. Gotcha." Coulson sighed. "Like Congress."

Damn, I could get to actually like this guy. "For what it's worth, what I saw didn't look anything like the descriptions I'd heard of either brother—Thor's supposed to have red hair, for one. But here's the other thing about the fae." I continued. "Nothing is ever what it seems with them. Sure, I've met Odin as the head of Monoc Securities, but I've also met him as..." Whoops, almost let the Santa secret slip there, "...someone else, who looked completely different. So, if he wanted to..."

"He could adopt another, totally different persona as an alien monarch, and he'd look completely different." Coulson nodded. "I see. And so could his sons."

"Pretty much." I nodded. "Or create a whole new species, for all I know, of aliens with the names of his pantheon. He'd have motive, too. Related or not, your 'aliens' have been very good for old Eyepatch."

"How so?"

I shrugged. "Popularity. After hundreds of years, people are starting to look up 'Odin' in the encyclopedia again. Some are even starting to believe in him again. I have reason to believe that this could get him a lot of currency in the magical realm."

"But people are believing in him as an alien." Coulson argued. "Doesn't that change things?"

"It might actually have helped." Thomas suggested. "I mean, gods walking the earth, that's nonsense. Aliens walking the earth, that's a conspiracy theory that's going to fester on forum boards for forever."

Damn, I hadn't thought of that. "It's possible." I agreed. "It's the sort of sneaky thing the fae would do. Odin's more straightforward than most, but he's also smart as heck. I could see it." I debated whether to share another piece of information. "Heck, there's talk of other gods doing something like it now, just because of how well Odin's done."

"So we might start seeing Ra, Ares, Quetzalcoatl on earth now?" Coulson asked. He sighed. "That's beautiful. One of our cells was already pretty sure that Hercules was coming to earth."

"Hercules?" I cast about. I was pretty sure I'd never met Hercules, or anyone else in the Greek pantheon with one exception. There were rumors they ran some sort of school in New York, but nothing that'd ever been substantiated. "Can't say I know anything about that. I have met Hades, though. Pretty nice guy, but he almost never leaves his home. Unlike most of the Greek gods, he's more concerned with doing his job then messing around with us mortals."

Coulson winced, as if disappointed. "Shoot." He looked at Murphy. "Looks like you'll have to get a team together after all, Agent Murphy."

That startled me. "What?"

Murphy actually blushed. I could probably count on the fingers of one hand the times I'd seen her do that. "I'm... the new head of Special Investigations." She reported. "At SHIELD."

"Seriously?" I sat back and blinked for a few moments. On the one hand, I was happy for Karrin, of course... she'd never been the same since she lost her old job, and I'd always known there was a part of her that still wanted to be a cop, not a vigilante. Technically she still would be, but ex-government vigilante organization was definitely a step up. As was "Head."

On the other hand... this was really not helping with my long-distance relationship anxieties. Neither was the fact that she was apparently going to be working for Mr. Gives-me-a-weird-feeling-I-can't place.

"Harry?" The others were looking at me strangely. "You've been quiet for five seconds. Something wrong?"

"Trying to think of a joke meshing 'Murphy' with 'Mulder and Scully.'" I answered, giving a contemplative frown. "Can't... quite get it to work."

Murphy snorted and threw a little clod of dirt at me.

"So..." I tried to think of something positive. "Good work?"

"It's not bad." Murphy shrugged. "Actually it's taken a bit of my workload off—Coulson provided tech support to help us better support the Paranet, which has helped us pick up a few of them as agents and others as regional consultants. And I've been getting in touch with 'Special Investigation' police units in other cities." She shrugged. "Most of them are pretty out in the cold with their own cities, so they're willing to work with an ex-cop."

"She's been very helpful in terms of networking and organizing." Coulson gave a pleased smile, and I felt rumble of irritation. "Already we practically have a whole new section, with global reach, most of whom aren't even on a regular payroll."

"The networks were always there." Murphy shot back. "You idiots were just clueless about them."

Coulson winced. Apparently that was a reference to an old argument. "So," I asked, as nonchalantly as possible, "How does that affect your work with the BFS?"

"So far, not a lot." Murphy shrugged. "They're basing the new Special Investigations place out of the castle, so it's really about the same."

I blinked. "Really? How does Marcone feel about that?" Marcone is a Chicago gangster more interested in making money than in dying from eldritch horrors, which is why he finances the BFS and essentially runs the castle they use.

"I spoke with Marcone." Coulson interposed, a little stiffly. Something told me he hadn't enjoyed the interview. "We managed to come to an understanding that..." he shrugged. "...left both of us unhappy, but not enough to keep complaining."

"Really." Marcone's better than most in his business about working with others, but again, ex-government watchdog agencies are a new high.

Coulson shrugged again. "I had an old friend in the underworld vouch for me. There's also talk—though Marcone didn't confirm it himself—that Chicago is under siege from the Maggia, an international crime syndicate." Coulson gave a wry smile. "So he also needs a certain amount of help."

Occasionally I forget that some of the people in the magical world have other things they do. Marcone's a gangster, but a lot of times I tend to lose track of the fact that that means he has plenty of ordinary enemies.

Then again, Marcone's got a crowd of undead Vikings for hitmen, plus at least one Valkyrie, so... "He'll be fine."

"Most likely." Coulson nodded. "But one can never have too many friends." He seemed to consider this a moment. "Or at least... mutually beneficial partnerships."

"Uh-huh." I answered, watching him. That was a pretty obvious lead-in. "Let me guess. And I should consider having more friends, right? Tell me, what mutual benefit do I get from this partnership?" They looked at me and I snorted. "This isn't the first time I've heard a employment pitch, you realize. You didn't come out to Demonreach for the scenery."

Coulson laughed and rubbed the back of his neck. "We don't want to recruit you per se, Mr. Dresden." He answered. "We're kind of a shiny-gadgets type of agency, and we hear those tend to blow up around you."

"True."

"Besides which, Agent Murphy says you have responsibilities on this island which mean you can't leave for more than a few days at a stretch before needing to return. Coupled with the shiny-gadgets-boom thing, that means you... really couldn't do anything for us." Coulson frowned. "Or really even tell us anything, without a boat ride or something. We can't even call you reliably, since you can't use cellphones and there's no landline to this island. So we'd rather not take you on, as a recruit or consultant."

"Fine by me," I said, letting out a huge sigh of relief. "I've got more commitments than I can comfortably ignore already." It was hard enough having to balance my responsibilities as Warden of the Council, Warden of Demonreach, and Knight of the Winter Court.

"What we WOULD like you to do is recommend some people who would be useful." Coulson added. "Thomas and Murphy have made a few suggestions already, but both of them agreed that you would know better."

I hmmm'd a little bit. "The thing is," I said, "most wizards don't have my sunny disposition or easy approachability. They don't have my good looks or sparkling intelligence either, but that's another matter."

"Or your humility." My brother deadpanned.

"Sad but true." I nodded. "The thing is, they're all leery of official attention, and they do their damnedest to stay out of human politics. It's even encouraged, at the Council level. I don't think they've done anything to 'meddle in muggle affairs' since World War II."

"World War II?" Coulson had a strange look on his face.

"Mostly the magical side." I told him. "Nothing to do with HYDRA. There was this guy named Kemmler... it's a long story."

"Kemmler?" Coulson leaned forward eagerly. "Heinrich Kemmler? One of the elite in Hitler's Thule society?"

I blinked at him. "You know about him?" Kemmler was the sort of dark secret that the Council had done their best to sweep under the carpet. And the Council had a lot of experience sweeping stuff under the carpet. It wasn't to say he was unknown, but it was to say that no ordinary person should have known about him. My weirdness detector went up a few notches.

"Johann Schmidt—the Red Skull, founder of HYDRA—consulted with him very closely in the early days." Coulson nodded. "It's thought that Kemmler was one of his major sources in obtaining the Tesseract. We could never find out very much about him, though. Was he really a necromancer?"

Kemmler hadn't been _a_ necromancer. Kemmler had been _the_ premiere necromancer of the past millennium, the sort of guy who makes Hitler look like a fluffy bunny by comparison. I mean, I'd never met the guy, but considering that my amoral talking skull considered him to be a sick, evil man and Mab, queen of the cold-hearted Winter Court, the lady who once ordered me to kill her own daughter (For good reason, but still) openly referred to him as a monster and a madman, I felt it was a safe assessment. The White Council killed him seven times over, not only because he deserved it, but also because doing it only once hadn't worked. His final execution back in '61 involved guns, axes, shovels, ropes, a flamethrower, and several other extremes. He wasn't a guy with a lot of friends, is what I'm saying.

"Three of his pupils nearly caused a zombie apocalypse eight or nine Halloweens ago, so yeah, probably." My brother deadpanned.

"What?" Murphy glanced from one of us to another. "Who tried to start a what now?" Oh, that's right. She had been vacationing with Kincaid in Hawaii when that had happened.

I rubbed my eyes tiredly. "So your Red Skull was friends with this guy?"

"At the start. Their rivalry got to be pretty bitter toward the end... according to records, Kemmler and Schmidt had a falling out over the Tesseract, and they became terrible enemies."

"I'll bet." 'Terrible' didn't begin to describe an enemy like Kemmler. Probably he'd sent Schmidt to get the Tesseract for his own uses, and seen his use of it as a betrayal. I had a feeling that if this Schmidt hadn't kept that Tesseract darn close, he'd have been hit with a butt-load of incredibly painful spells.

"What's this about zombies?" Murphy asked. She had a very peeved look on her face. Murph doesn't like being kept in the dark about things.

"Later." I rubbed my forehead, thinking hard. "Did Kemmler have people in HYDRA?" I asked.

"A number of his people went over to help with the search for the Tesseract." Coulson answered.

"This is just a thought, but it's possible Kemmler actually did the magical world a solid." I said, rubbing my chin. "Either because of his infiltrators in the group, or through some magic curse or something" (It would probably have required Black Magic, but that sort of stuff was peanuts to a guy who started world wars just so he could play with more corpses) "Kemmler might have hid the magic world from HYDRA just to spite Schmidt. He probably saw Schmidt as more of a threat than the White Council, at the time."

"And in the process of hiding it from HYDRA, he hid it from SHIELD, too." Coulson nodded. "It fits. Every so often, our enemies solve our problems for us."

"It solves one, at least." I smiled at Coulson. "Though not completely. That sort of connection is definitely the sort of thing that might interest the Council. Not enough to give you firepower against HYDRA, but enough to get them to pay attention to you.

"Unless it turns out that Schmidt's people got a hold of some of Kemmler's necromancy textbooks before they parted ways. The Council's been trying to wipe out Kemmlerite necromancy and destroy all his works for decades. Even then, don't count on them offering to help with anything other than the Kemmlerites."

"That's all I'm asking for." Coulson spread his hands. "I'm not the sort to try and boss around a crowd of super-powered wizards, believe me. Honestly, all this magic stuff sort of freaks me out—I'd rather not use it more than I have to. But if there's anything we can do to help..." He shrugged. "...we're in the same world. We should try to have some sort of understanding so we're not getting into each other's way."

"You should probably start by talking with the different Wardens." I advised. "They're the day-to-day enforcers you're most likely to be working with or against. I'd begin with Ramirez."

"They mentioned him." Coulson nodded at Murphy and Thomas, who were also nodding. "The... Warden in charge of the Western seaboard, right?"

"Tex would be a good one to talk to also." I offered. "He's in charge of..."

"Texas. Yeah, I got it." Coulson looked amused.

I grinned in response. "Anyway, you'll probably want to talk to all of the Wardens at some point, just so you know each other and don't get in each other's way. But Ramirez is the friendliest, and most open, so he's the one you should start with. Then he can provide introductions and things will go much smoother."

"Ah." Coulson exchanged glances with Murphy and Thomas. "I was sort of hoping you would introduce us to the White Council." He answered.

I boggled at him. I've done a lot of boggling in my time, the price of working with people who often simply don't get how the magic world works. "What?"

"Not, like, actually bring us in to meet them." Coulson held up his hands. "We're not that stupid. But just... tell them about us. Let them know we're aware of the magic community, and we want to help."

"I'm not sure that would really recommend you to them." I frowned. "Again, wizards aren't fans of secretive agencies. That's sort of their thing, and they worry about copyright infringement. Plus, I'm not sure I can exaggerate how much I am not in the White Council's good books right now."

"You still have some friends." Murphy pointed out. "Plenty of good people still in that Council who respect you."

"Ramirez would still be better."

"If Ramirez comes to them, they'll find out you talked to us anyway, and ask why you never told them." Coulson looked a little smug, and I realized he was hardly a new hand at manipulating people. "Work it as a way of currying favor, if you like—warn them about us. Say you wanted to be sure they were alert to the danger."

I stared at the man. "You want me to deliberately set a bunch of ultra-powerful wizards with chips on their shoulders and huge judgmental complexes against you."

"If it helps this Ramirez come along with a positive report that completely discounts it, sure." Coulson smirked. "Worst case scenario, you'll look a little paranoid."

Paranoid isn't bad. Lots of famous wizards are paranoid, although technically it isn't paranoia when you actually do have curses and demons and various supernatural entities out to get you.

Finally I shrugged. "I can work with that," I said. "I'll send word on up to the White Council, let them know. Due warning, though..." I raised a finger. "Working with the White Council is always a one-way relationship. You may help them, but good luck getting them to help you. And they're not likely to be too happy about the fact that you're associated with an organization distantly connected to one of their biggest headaches." I had a feeling a soulgaze was in Coulson's future, in some form or another.

"Grumpy people are nothing new." Coulson shook his head. "I'm not expecting the council's help against HYDRA. I'm the newcomer to this rodeo. I just want to open some lines of communication." He hesitated. "That being said, we are really out of our depth in this whole magic business..."

I grinned. "I can think of a few wizards who might be able to give more practical help—Elaine Mallory, for one."

"Your ex?" Thomas blinked at me. Murphy frowned.

"She's a wizard-for-hire, like me." I shrugged. "Or like I used to be, anyway. More open to working with normals. And she's more accessible, so she should be easier to consult. She's also a shiny-gadgets-go-boom person, though, so..."

"We'll take precautions." Coulson nodded. "Is one of them this man, by any chance?" He brought a picture out of his coat—a white man with black close-cropped hair and a goatee. "His name is Steven Strange. We have reason to think he's part of the magical community, but we've yet to find anything about him."

I studied the picture and shook my head. "Sorry. Don't know him."

Coulson made a frustrated sound and pocketed the picture. "It figures. The only thing we've been able to get on him is the name 'Rashid,' and we don't even know what that means."

I froze. Rashid I knew. Anyone who was anyone in the magical world knew Rashid, Senior member of the White Council, the Gatekeeper, one of the most powerful wizards in the cosmos. Few people knew he was the literal Gatekeeper, the man responsible for keeping the Outsiders outside. I wanted desperately to ask Coulson for the picture again, to see if there was any resemblance. Was he family? An apprentice? A civilian disguise?

But asking would have been too suspicious. So I shook my head. "Sorry. Don't know anything about that either."

Coulson eyed me narrowly, and I got the feeling he'd been lied to by much better liars than me. But he just shrugged. "If you DO find anything out about him, be sure to tell him he was apparently on HYDRA's hit list."

"Sure." Another thing that might get the Council's attention. Though if this Steven Strange was at all connected to Rashid, I doubted he was ever in any real danger.

"And I don't suppose the name 'Ivy' means anything to you either."

Ivy, teenage girl and holder of the Archive, recorder of all written knowledge in the history of ever? "Nope, never heard that name before." Murphy looked a little cagy and just slightly freaked out. I got the impression this was something of a sticking point between her and Coulson.

"Fair enough." Coulson shrugged, standing. "I guess I can understand the desire to keep secrets, what with being a fugitive and all. Thanks for your help."

"If I see Odin, I'll ask about Thor." I grinned, standing also, and shaking his hand.

Coulson winced. "Please don't. He still thinks I'm dead, and I'd rather keep it that way."

My handshake froze. It was impossible, but maybe... "You died?" I asked. "For real?"

"Sort of?" He shrugged. "I mean, it's not like I remember much after getting stabbed through the chest. They tell me I was medically dead for several weeks." He shook his head. "It's... kind of complicated."

That was it. That was the weird vibe I was getting off of him, the strange connection gnawing at the back of my mind.

Resurrection isn't common, even in the wizarding world. Those who did manage to go to the other side and back (Without necromancy being involved), like me, tended to be at the center of very freaky stuff. (Granted, I had sort of been before, too, but dying had definitely upped the weirdness factor.) Somehow, the world tended to focus on them, make them the center of cataclysmic events.

And, apparently, they shared a weird connection that I'd never known about till now.

"Yeah." I nodded amiably. "Been there before." Coulson's eyes widened as he caught my meaning. I slapped him on the shoulder. "We'll have to talk more later, Phil."

He smiled back. "Definitely."

 

A/N: This chapter was co-written by Afalstein like the last one was, only this time he was the primary author while I did the revising when it was the other way around last time.


	3. Chapter 3

The place was abandoned, and had been since its owner had died several months before. Mireille and Kirika didn't find that particularly surprising. They _had_ been the ones to kill the previous residents, after all. But despite that, the manor house was strangely empty.

 

"Everything's gone," Mireille said after they had searched the building. "No records of any kind were left behind. The only question is who took them, Breffort's people or Fortunato's?"

 

"They even removed all the bodies." Kirika added. Mireille looked at her. "They're not where we left them, there aren't any new graves in the old funeral plot, and nobody's disturbed the soil in the vineyard. Someone must have taken them somewhere."

 

"Why would they do that?" Mireille wondered. "This villa is in the middle of nowhere, only a handful of people outside the area even know it exists. Removing or destroying records is one thing, but we left two dozen bodies lying around here, and I can't see Breffort going to the effort carting them off when there are plenty of places to bury them right here where nobody would notice. Let's see if there are any graves elsewhere around here."

 

They searched the grounds for two hours. At no point did the two find any disturbed soil that might conceal a grave or burn scars to mark the place of an old pyre. Nor was there any evidence that someone had carried all the bodies to the lava pit where Altena met her end. The closest thing they found was a stone slab that had once been used as a bier. Kirika picked up the small, bloodstained fork lying on the otherwise empty slab and turned to her partner.

 

"Something is very wrong here."

 

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Karrin Murphy winced as Butters crashed into the ground again. The coroner turned Knight was hardly the most imposing physical specimen out there. Unfortunately for him, his opponent was.

 

"Remember, Butters, you were the one who promised you'd start sparring with them." She said teasingly.

 

"How was I supposed to know that I'd actually end up getting a functional lightsaber?" He groaned as he picked himself up off the floor.

 

Snorri laughed at his sparring partner's predicament before resuming the match. Murphy cringed as she rose to her feet. Her own match with the Einherjar had driven home something she hadn't wanted to admit. Despite the very expensive physical therapy that Dresden's gift had allowed her to purchase, she wasn't going to be able to return to her peak condition. Age and the beating she had received from Nicodemus the year before had seen to that. It wouldn't be long until she had to leave the field work to other people.

 

If she was working for any part of SHIELD other than Special Investigations, she probably could have gotten a lot closer to 100% with the help of their new prosthetic technology. Unfortunately, dealing with magic meant that there was a non-trivial chance that Deathlok technology would break down just by being around the things her job required her to deal with. Hopefully SHIELD would eventually figure out a way to make technology not fail around magic so often - at least enough to make things like cell phones and laptops reliable in the presence of moderately talented wizards. It would make her work a lot easier.

 

Checking her watch, Murphy saw that it was almost time for her meeting. Baron Marcone would be arriving any minute now. Heading out of the training area, she left for her office. As if on cue, the front door opened just as she was walking past the entryway.

 

It was Marcone, but his entrance was hardly the sort one would expect from one of the most powerful men in the city in both the magical and non-magical worlds. His bodyguard Hendricks was literally dragging him across the threshold.

 

"We're under attack!" Hendricks announced.

 

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The car pulled up on the street. Sigrun Gard got out, followed by her colleague, Hendricks, and her employer, Gentleman Johnny Marcone, Baron of Chicago. Looking around the area, she saw that there were non-locals loitering on the sidewalk, a dark-skinned man who was tapping his cane against the pavement in a slow, steady pace, and a teenaged girl with red hair so dark it almost looked purple. What were they doing here, she wondered.

 

If she hadn't been watching them at that moment, Sigrun wouldn't have been able to react in time. The man pointed at the Baron with his free hand. Barely a second later, a knife flew from the girl's hand, aimed straight for Marcone.

 

"Get him inside!" Sigrun ordered as she blocked the knife. As Hendricks hurried to get their employer to safety, the girl rushed towards them with surprising speed. The Valkyrie moved to intercept her.

 

A dagger thrust towards her throat. Sigrun sidestepped it, catching her attacker's wrist and delivering a blow to her forearm that should have broken her arm, or at the very least forced her to drop the knife. The girl didn't even flinch. Instead she just produced a second knife in her other hand and continued attacking, forcing Sigrun to release her in order to defend herself.

 

The assassin now had the measure of Sigrun's strength and speed. Her own strength and speed, while lesser, were far greater than a child of her size should have been capable of. She also seemed to ignore pain. While the girl was good enough to avoid or deflect any solid hits, a normal human would have seen sent sprawling by a few of the weaker ones. Sigrun, on the other hand, could definitely feel all the cuts she had received in return.

 

As Sigrun cursed the mortal laws that made it impractical to keep her battleaxe with her at all times, the door to the castle opened. Hendricks had sounded the alarm, and the Einherjar posted there were responding. Sven the door guard was the first to exit, his own axe at the ready. It did him no good. The assassin ducked under his swing with insulting ease before slicing open his belly and throat. The human warrior Murphy opened fire with her pistol, but the bullets didn't appear to do any more damage than any of Sigrun's blows did.

 

But the brief respite had given Sigrun enough time to change tactics. Reaching into her pocket, she felt through the rune-engraved stones she kept there until she found the one she was looking for. Tossing the stone at the feet of the assassin, she was rewarded with an eruption of fire. Shrieking in pain, the assassin fell back.

 

Taking up Sven's fallen axe, Sigrun advanced on her foe, ready to hack her wounded opponent into pieces. But before she could, a car pulled up on the street, its stereo pounding out a massive bass beat that could be heard across the block. The assassin's partner hurriedly got in, and called for the girl to do the same. Moments later, the car's engine was gunned and the attackers were rushed out of sight.

 

"What was that?" Sigrun wondered as the car sped away. Turning back to the castle, she saw that Snorri and Butters had joined the crowd. Snorri was kneeling next to his fallen brother-in-arms and shook his head. Sven would never feast in Valhalla again.

 

"That beat..." Butters said. "It was acting like a drummer. We're dealing with a necromancer."

 

\------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

"We have an update from Black Widow and Noir on their interrogations, sir." Agent Koenig reported.

 

"What have they gotten?" Director Coulson asked.

 

Koenig dutifully recited a summary of all the information they'd gotten since their last report. "And one last thing. Apparently Fortunato said something about lending some of his men to a man in the service of one of his HYDRA contacts - a Samuel Barone. He didn't know what his men were to be doing, only that it had something to do with a project of Barone's inspired by something he found in a set of old books, and that it took them to a location that Noir identified as a former Soldat stronghold they had eliminated before we recruited them."

 

"Do we have anything on this Soldat organization they care so much about?"

 

"Not really. Agent Skye looked into the background of the only senior member of this group that they were able to identify but never got around to killing, one Remy Breffort. She said that there was definitely something fishy about him, but wasn't able to work out what before needing to go out to support Agent Triplett. Certainly nothing to prove that he's a key member of a thousand year old cult devoted to taking over the world - one so highly secretive that we can't even prove it exists. The most the physical evidence Noir had acquired proves is that there _was_ a group known as Les Soldats back in the 18th Century with some connection to the Sicilian Mob, but nothing that would indicate that they're still around or what they're up to.

 

"Anyway, they said that upon returning to the site, they found it had been stripped of two things since they had last been there - documents, and bodies."

 

"Bodies?"

 

"Yes, sir. Apparently they had left roughly two dozen bodies behind from their raid, and they're not there now. The only one they're not sure of is the body of the High Priestess, and that's just because they can't tell if someone pulled her out of the lava pit they dropped her in or if the body simply sank. There's also no evidence that the bodies were burned or buried, either at the location itself or in the only nearby community. They're simply gone, and Noir admitted that they couldn't see a sensible reason to haul away two dozen bodies over mountain back roads when there were plenty of places to dispose of them right there."

 

"Hm.. They're right. If concealing the bodies was the point of the exercise, it would have been simpler to dispose of them there if they had the time. There must have been some other reason why they removed them. But what?"

 

Coulson's musing was interrupted by a noise from Koenig's tablet. Koening looked at it for a moment and then looked up.

 

"It's a report from Special Investigations. There was an attempt on the life of Johnny Marcone earlier today. According to Agent Murphy's statement, the attacker was a... necromancer?"

 

Coulson's blood ran cold as connections formed in his mind. "Get me what information you can find on Barone, now!"

 

Minutes later Coulson was comparing the description of the necromancer to a photograph of Samuel Barone, professional criminal and voodoo priest. While it was hardly a conclusive match, it was quite possible that they were the same person.

 

"Back during the war, HYDRA was affiliated with a necromancer - a necromancer known for writing and distributing books about his art. Now two dozen bodies go missing on the behalf of a HYDRA agent who is a practitioner of a religion that is often associated with zombies and just happens to have come into some old books. A HYDRA practitioner who is an associate of a Maggia chieftain with HYDRA connections. And then a crime boss at odds with the Maggia gets attacked by a zombie.

 

"This isn't a coincidence. Barone has some of Kemmler's books, and he's putting them to use. And I doubt he's going to stop with a few assassinations. We're going to have to take him down, fast.

 

"Send the Barone file to Agent Murphy. Then order Noir to Chicago to hook up with Special Investigations. They knew who Barone's creations were in life, that might help in stopping them. If May or Triplett is available, have them head over there as well to act as liason."

 

"Yes, sir. One last thing - Romanoff wanted to know what she should do with Fortunato and Solohob once she's finished interrogating them."

 

Coulson thought about that for a moment. "Fortunato's suspected of being involved in quite a few crimes in New York. Agent Reese knows a man in the NYPD he can trust. Tell her that once she's milked them dry, if we haven't found some other use for them she should have them shipped to New York and arrange for their location and enough of the interrogation to ensure they'll be behind bars for a long time to fall into the hands of Lieutenant Fusco of the NYPD Homicide Task Force."

 

Koenig nodded, and left to attend to his tasks.

 

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It's a basic law of nature in comic books that heroes never get to take a vacation - whenever they try, something will happen that forces them to put on the cape, or tights, or whatever it is they wear when on the job. Now it seemed like that law was inserting itself into my life. All I had been planning was a simple weekend away from Demonreach. Play with Maggie, walk my dog, see if Murph could get free from her SHIELD work long enough for a date, have a few beers at Mac's, pick up some groceries to test out my latest attempt at creating a magical refrigerator, that sort of thing. My hopes for that ended the moment I saw Will waiting at the end of the alley that formed the Chicago end of the Way between Demonreach and the city.

 

"Harry", Will greeted me. "Murph was sure you'd be showing up today. We need you at the castle."

 

I sighed. I knew it. "What's going on?"

 

"It'd be best if we not talk about it here, but it involves someone named Kemmler."

 

Heinrich Kemmler. The single nastiest warlock of the past millennium. Directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of fifteen million people, mainly so that he'd have more corpses to work with for his necromancy research, and that was the low-end estimate. I kissed my weekend off goodbye as I followed Will to his car.

 

Kemmler couldn't possibly be involved directly - the Council had killed him in a spectacularly thorough manner fifty years back - but that didn't mean much. He still had at least one apprentice out there, and his do-it-yourself necromancy texts had been giving the Council headaches for decades. Either of these could easily cause a world of trouble. The only real question was how much.

 

I wasn't the only one arriving at the castle. Another car pulled up just as I was getting out. A black man got out of the driver's seat, followed by two women, one an Asian girl who looked like she should still be in high school, and a blonde who couldn't have been more than four or five years older.

 

Inside the castle that had been erected on the ruins of my old apartment, I found that Marcone and several of his people were waiting there. I noted that Ms Gard had numerous minor injuries all over her. The last time I could recall anyone getting past her guard, she had gotten into a fight with one of the Fallen. That alone kicked the danger level of the situation up several notches.

 

"Agent Triplett, I presume?" Murph asked of the man.

 

"And you must be Agent Murphy," He responded. "These are the two contractors you were told I was bringing along, Mireille Bouquet," He pointed to the blonde, "And Kirika Yumura." The Asian girl.

 

"And what do these contractors bring to the table, Agent Triplett?" Marcone inquired.

 

"SHIELD retains them to capture or eliminate high-profile targets. You've probably heard of them before, or at least their codename: Noir."

 

While the name didn't mean anything to me, it did mean something to some of the others. The normally unflappable king of the Chicago underworld flinched. His bodyguards edged into a closer formation around him. Gard started eyeing the two as serious threats, even though the younger of the two was now sitting down and stroking my cat. Looking over them, I could see why. Both of them carried themselves like they had been through quite a few nasty situations. I had the feeling that both of them could go from harmless to lethal on a moment's notice, even with my enormous cat now lying on the younger one's lap. Hell, the girl might even find a way to kill someone _with_ the cat (Which might not actually be that hard, given how much Mister weighed).

 

"Noir?" Murph eyed the two women. "The internationally wanted killer?"

 

"The one who utterly annihilated the Hong Yiban triad and caused the Greones to have to replace the head of the family three times over the course of a week? Is those two?" Marcone added.

 

"We only killed two of the Greone heads," Mireille corrected. "The other one was the result of internal politics. And there were three of us back when we did the Triad job."

 

"So, Murph, what's going on and why do you think there are Kemmlerites involved?" I said, not wanting the day to be spent discussing the exploits of a pair of professional killers.

 

Murphy quickly filled me in on what had happened. While it wasn't bad enough to require the contents of the large bag Butters had with him, at least not yet, it was still pretty bad. Chicago had enough problems without a warlock taking control of organized crime in the city. Though I had trouble taking part of this situation seriously when I saw a picture of the necromancer.

 

"Does he _really_ dress like this?" I chortled. "Because that thing on the hood of his cloak makes him look like a giant chicken."

 

"He wasn't wearing it when he tried to kill Marcone." Murphy agreed. "He might know enough about fashion to understand when not to wear outfits like that in public."

 

"Can you describe the assassin with Barone?" Kirika asked. Ms Gard started describing the zombie. Kirika nodded.

 

"I was afraid of that. It's Chloe."

 

"Who's Chloe?" Butters inquired.

 

"She was the third Noir. She and I grew up together, trained together, fought together. Ultimately, I was forced to kill her."

 

"How long ago was that?" I interjected.

 

"Earlier this year."

 

Not good. The strength of the typical zombie increases the longer its been dead. That was why necromancers never used the recently deceased if they could avoid it. . For this Chloe to be able to kill an Einherjar and fight on equal terms with a Valkyrie while being so recently dead meant that she was pretty much that good back when she was still alive. I didn't want to think about how dangerous she'd get if allowed to age awhile.

 

"We recently learned from a captured Maggia don - one Vincente Fortunato - that he had loaned some men to Barone to raid the place where Chloe was killed," Mireille continued. Marcone looked as if he was taking a mental note - probably to make some inroads on Fortunato's territory while he was out. "When we returned there, we found that someone had taken Chloe's body, along with the bodies of everyone else we had killed there that day. Now we know why."

 

I shook my head. "I hope you're not planning on any former connection between you and this Chloe helping you out. So long as Barone's drummer is playing, she'll do whatever he wants to her to do.

 

"And the important thing right now is finding them. I don't suppose that Chloe or Barone left anything of theirs behind when they tried killing Marcone?"

 

As Murph and Gard apologized for not being able to get anything like that, Kirika carefully dislodged Mister and stood up. Reaching into a pocket, she produced a small, two-tined fork with reddish stains on it.

 

"Will this do?" She inquired.

 

"A fork?"

 

"I used it as a holdout weapon once. Later that evening Chloe asked if she could have it. She kept with her everywhere, up until the afternoon I stabbed her to death with it. Barone's people left it behind when they took her body. Her blood is still on it."

 

Okay, so we weren't dealing with a scarily good undead assassin. We were dealing with a scarily good undead _stalker_ assassin.

 

"Well, I've never worked with the centerpiece of a stalker shrine before, but this should work."

 

As I prepared the tracking spell, I listened to the others talk.

 

"Stalker shrine?" The younger visitor asked.

 

"Kirika, Chloe was obsessed with you," The older of the two visitors said. "Do you remember _why_ you had to kill her? You sided with me over her in a fight, and she tried to kill both of us, screaming 'How could you choose her over me?' the whole time?"

 

Make that scarily good undead _psycho_ stalker assassin.

 

Fortunately, the spell didn't take too long to cast, but the conversation still lasted long enough to establish that Kirika was utterly clueless about just about anything not connected with killing people. That was the problem training people from childhood to fit a role - they often didn't know how to be anything else. Hopefully SHIELD would get the girl some help.

 

"I have a trail." I announced, breaking up the other conversation. After a quick raid of the armory to pick up equipment appropriate for taking zombies apart, everyone apart for a few of the Einherjar who stayed behind to guard Marcone headed out for the cars.

 

The trail took us to a warehouse. Thankfully, Barone hadn't gone to the expense of setting up any advanced security systems, either magical or mundane, so all it took to break in was a prybar. After walking through a room that contained a ridiculous number of refrigerators, we heard two people talking.

 

"Your secondary project seems to be working out better than your primary, Barone," The first man said. "Marcone is still alive. Your servant wasn't able to get past his bodyguard, much less kill him. I think it's time you were pulled out of the field and put on interrogations."

 

"You dare question my power?" The second man, who was apparently Barone, bellowed. A peek around the doorframe showed that he was wearing the chicken cloak, and had painted an inverted cross on his chest for some reason. The only times of year a man could dress like that and not stick out like a sore thumb were Halloween and Mardi Gras, and we don't even hold big Mardi Gras celebrations in Chicago.

 

"Your powers are more useful extracting the secrets of the dead. It means we don't need to worry about taking enemies alive if we need to interrogate them. We have plenty of people capable of killing our enemies, and most of them don't require some elaborate system to ensure that they always hear drumbeats to keep them from disobeying orders."

 

"Fool! Soon I will have an unstoppable army. Today I have only a few servants. Soon I shall have thousands. And who would dare challenge a man who commands the dead?"

 

I grinned. It's always nice when the bad guys give you a cue.

 

"Samuel David Barone!" I bellowed. "You are charged with violating the Fifth Law of Magic! Surrender yourself to the judgment of the White Council or we will cut you down where you stand."

 

Barone may have been a cheesy dresser, but he wasn't a complete idiot. He reached over to flip a switch on a radio he was standing next to. "Destroy the intruders!" He commanded, then grabbed a satchel and ran.

 

Behind us, the refrigerators started opening. And from within them emerged horde of zombies.

 

Unfortunately for the horde of undead women, we had brought along a dozen undead Vikings, all of whom were carrying big axes and were looking for payback. Cutting through the zombies took time, though. By the time they had been dealt with, Barone and his associate had fled.

 

Racing through the door they had escaped through, I found a staircase leading into the undercity. The tunnel was strewn with recently dead bodies. A little further down, I found the body of Barone's associate. He had been knifed. Two sets of footprints lead away from the scene. Following them lead me back to the surface, and a place where he had apparently stashed a car. I had lost them.

 

When I made it back, Murph and the others were taking the place apart.

 

"It looks like Barone was using the other zombies he had to grab people for interrogation." Triplett said as he photographed a thick stack of papers. I kept away from him to reduce the risk of damaging his cell phone. "People wouldn't be able to expect that their kidnapper wouldn't be capable of feeling pain, making it harder to escape. Besides, if he really was interrogating their corpses, he wouldn't need to care about whether his targets were damaged when being grabbed."

 

"I figured out how Barone controlled those zombies without a drum." Butters said. "These devices by the wall are crude radio transmitters. Each of the zombies is wearing earbuds. The transmitters were probably transmitting the drum to one ear and any commands he might have had to the other. So long as he took care not to use magic around them, the risk of breaking the transmitter or the receivers was minimal."

 

"Then why did he need to manually drum for Chloe during the attempt at Marcone?" Murph wondered.

 

"At a guess, he ran out of receivers after equipping everyone else."

 

"That might explain why she isn't here." Kirika added.

 

"I think she might be with Barone." I joined in. "He killed the person he was talking with, but there was a second set of footprints going on past the body."

 

"Do you know where he went?" Murphy asked.

 

"To a place where he had a getaway car. He had driven away by the time I got there."

 

"Then we'll have to see if any of the things he left behind might tell us where he's going. He said something about an army. That probably means that he's going to some cemetery to make more zombies. The question is which one."

 

While I burned the remains of the zombies, Murphy helped photograph the rest of the papers and contacted her old partner at CPD Special Investigations about all the bodies in the tunnel. It wouldn't be long until Barone found himself hunted by the local authorities for that.

 

One of the papers that Murphy found turned out to be a map, which unfortunately didn't contain the region that the various roads and rivers depicted in it were found in. Triplett sent a copy to a colleague at SHIELD named Skye and told her to figure out what it was a map of. A few hours later, she called back.

 

"The map is of Arlington County in Virginia." She reported.

 

Triplett turned to look at the rest of the group. "Arlington County contains the Arlington National Cemetery - the largest military cemetery in the country."

 

Butters paled. "There are hundreds of thousands of bodies interred there. Tens of thousands of them are close to a hundred and fifty years old. Could Barone raise that many people?"

 

"Even if he can't, he can certainly raise enough to make things very unpleasant for wherever he marches them." I answered.

 

"And two places that are in the general direction of the areas he's thinking about marching them are Washington, DC and the Pentagon." Skye added.

 

"Agent Skye, contact the Director about this. See if he can get us any reinforcements." Murphy ordered. "Dresden, get on the line to Edinburgh, and then find us a Way to Arlington. If we can't beat Barone there, we're going to need the help of the Wardens to keep him contained."

 

"Right," I said. "Butters, make sure to grab the Plan B bag on your way out. If things go south, we can probably grab the rest of what we need from the Smithsonian."

 

\------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

When Kirika heard the term 'Way to Arlington', she expected Dresden to book a train ride or flight to Virginia. She didn't expect a multi-hour hike through a surreal other world. She certainly didn't expect the fastest route from Chicago to Arlington to go through Phoenix, Arizona.

 

After finally reaching their destination, the group rented some cars and drove to their destination. The sun was setting as they arrived at the cemetery.

 

"If he's here, he'll almost certainly be at one of the plots for Civil War veterans," Dresden said. "They're the oldest ones here, so they'll be the most powerful."

 

The group started making their way towards the oldest section of the graveyard. It wasn't long until they spotted a group in the distance. The hooded cloak with the thing on top that looked like a rooster's comb easily gave away the identity of one of them.

 

"There he is," Murphy pointed. "We don't have time to wait for any reinforcements. We have to take him down now."

 

Barone wasn't alone. Chloe was standing next to him, and a short distance away were a group of blank-faced members of a military band, mindlessly tapping out a slow rhythm on their drums.

 

"You're too late," Barone gloated. "My spell is complete. Within moments my unstoppable army of the dead will rise. HAIL HYDRA!" He cried out.

 

The ground around them started to stir. Skeletal hands forced themselves out of the ground, followed by the rest of their bodies.

 

"Just try to stop me now." Barone dared them.

 

Butters, the short medical examiner, pulled out a broken sword hilt and grinned. "There is no try." He said as a blade of pure light emerged from the hilt.

 

The sword sliced one of the undead soldiers in half with a single swipe. Recognizing the coroner as a primary threat, Chloe threw a knife at him. Kirika swiftly drew her gun and shot it out of the air. The undead Soldat assassin looked at the ex-Soldat assassin and charged.

 

Kirika dropped the gun - bullets wouldn't do any good against her current opponent. As the sounds of battle spread around her, she sidestepped Chloe's first knife thrust and countered with an open palm strike that should have put her on the ground gasping for breath. Unfortunately, Chloe no longer needed to breathe. She simply took the blow and kept on attacking. In desperation, Kirika rolled backwards, turning the strike into a throw.

 

Around them, more and more skeletons started rising. The others were holding them back, but they were a lot harder to take down than the resurrected priestesses Barone had kept at his hideout. Killing Barone might stop the dead from rising, but nobody could get free of their current engagements to make a try for him. They might not even be able to retreat to attempt Dresden's plan B, whatever it was. As Kirika fought to hold off her former friend who could no longer feel pain or fatigue, she realized that this wasn't a fight they could win. Triplett had said that someone known as the Hawk was coming after fielding a call during their stop in Arizona, and Dresden had promised the aid of some members of a group called the Wardens. The only question was whether they would come fast enough. All she could do until then was keep Chloe occupied so that she couldn't attack Butters or Dresden - the wizard's magic and the coroner's magic sword were doing more damage than any three of the others fighting, losing either of them would doom them all. She couldn't even spare the time to draw the sword she had borrowed from the BFS.

 

Endless minutes passed. Skeletons rose from the grave only to be cut down, only to be replaced with even more skeletons. Wounds started to accumulate as the defenders tired, preventing them from stopping all their attacks. It was only a matter of time before somebody fell, at which point it would become progressively easier for the undead to swarm under the others.

 

A series of explosions cracked through the graveyard. Chloe leaped aside as an arrow streaked through the air where she was standing and exploded when it struck the ground. Kirika took advantage of the distraction to draw her sword. With the added reach the blade gave her, she was able to fend off the attacks of the undead Noir far more easily. Through the corner of her eye Kirika could see figures in grey cloaks joining the fight. The reinforcements had arrived.

 

The grey-cloaked figures quickly established a perimeter and started closing the circle. But it was slow going.

 

"The drums!" Dresden called out. "Shoot out the drums!"

 

The drums had been playing at the same slow rate for the entire battle. One by one they fell silent. As they did, the skeletons rising from the ground stopped attacking. Instead they all turned towards Barone.

 

There wasn't a single person buried in Arlington who hadn't fought for his country. A great many of them had also died for it. With an arrow stuck through each of the drumheads, the beat which allowed Barone to control the undead veterans was gone, allowing them to express exactly what they felt about the man who was ordering them to destroy the country they had fought and died for.

 

"No!" Barone protested. "I am the Black Talon! I am the Master of Death! You serve me! Aargh!" His chest suddenly sprouted a throwing knife, and he toppled to the ground.

 

"No," Hissed a voice that Kirika barely recognized as Chloe's. " _I_ am the maiden who governs death. You are _nothing_."

 

As Barone died, the skeletons all started falling, their unlife fading as the spells that resurrected them unraveled. Chloe turned around to face her former partner. Extending two figures, she placed her hand on her heart and bowed. Kirika returned the gesture. Then Chloe's forearm flopped over, the enchantments holding a shattered forearm in place having faded. Her appearance blurred, becoming something that rather obviously belonged to someone who had been dead for some time.

 

Chloe staggered toward Kirika, stumbling as the magic that allowed her to walk on a leg that Kirika had hamstrung during the fight gave out. Kirika raised her sword in defense, but Chloe simply allowed it to impale her as she grabbed Kirika's shoulder with her good hand and pulled herself up.

 

"Kirika..." She whispered as she pressed her lips to Kirika's own. Then the light in her dead eyes went out and the maiden who governed death surrendered herself into her servant's care once more.

 

As Chloe's once again lifeless body slumped to the ground, Kirika looked around. One of the people in gray walked over to Barone's body, examined a satchel he had with him, and burned the contents. Some others went to examine the drummers, who were now looking around bewilderedly wondering what they were doing in this area of the cemetery at this hour, what had caused all the carnage around them, and what had happened to their drums. The rest were cleaning up the graveyard. A man with a longbow was scanning the area for any further trouble, while Murphy and Butters talked with some people who looked official who had been attracted to the sounds of violence.

 

"Who are you people?" One of the officials demanded.

 

"The name's Butters. I'm a medical examiner."

 

"What does a _coroner_ have to do with all this?"

 

"We really don't like it when the dead come back to life. Do you have _any_ idea how much that complicates the typical autopsy report?"

 

\------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

After finally clearing things up with the local authorities (At least sufficiently that they were willing to let them leave the cemetery with the understanding that they could be called in to answer more questions at a later time, and Murphy privately suspected that the unnatural luck granted to all Knights of the Cross like Butters had something to do with it), Murphy took her ad hoc team into town to find a motel for the night. In the morning, Dresden took them back through the Ways to Chicago.

 

When they finally made it back to the castle, Ms. Gard had dragged Noir away for an explanation of the term 'Maiden Who Governs Death'. This was followed by a great deal of violent-sounding noise from the training area as she checked to see if the two were actually good enough to claim that in the presence of a Chooser of the Slain.

 

Cringing at the sound of another crash, Murphy asked one question of Butters. "By the way, what is in the Plan B bag that you and Dresden threw together?"

 

Butters opened the bag. Murphy stared.

 

" _Why_ does Plan B for a zombie invasion involve a polka suit?" She demanded.

 

"Because polka will never die." Dresden and Butters said in unison.

 

Murphy sighed. She was afraid to ask what that meant, but equally certain that she had to.

 

\------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

A/N: The term "Maiden who governs death" to describe Noir doesn't appear to be anything other than an ominous title in canon, but it sure does inspire questions in a world with zombies and Valkyries in it, doesn't it?

 

No, there aren't any T. Rexes like Sue in the Smithsonian Museum of National History. It does have a nearly complete Stegosaurus named Roadkill, though.


	4. Chapter 4

Murphy looked around at the other members of the Brighter Future Society. "Alright people, we're about to get company. The Feds have drawn the connection between Barone's attack on Arlington and all the murders that Special Investigations have pinned on him due to their bodies being found in the basement of the building he was renting. The head of their anti-HYDRA task force is coming here to talk with Sergeant Rawlins about the case we handed him.

"And this is a problem for us. The officer in question, a Colonel Glenn Talbot, absolutely despises SHIELD and has been using its infiltration by HYDRA as grounds to seize or arrest anything connected to SHIELD that he can find."

"Has anyone pointed out to him that the US Senate and the Cabinet were also heavily penetrated by HYDRA?" Daniel Carpenter asked.

"If they have, he hasn't done anything about it. Unfortunately, asking a fanatic to be consistent about things is a waste of time. In any case, we're going to have to lay low until he leaves, otherwise he's likely to make our lives very difficult. There's a very good chance that his people are going to want to talk with at least some of the people who were identified at Arlington. Butters, you're the most likely one, as they definitely know you were there, and you also did the autopsies on many of Barone's victims."

"I'll be ready," Butters said.

"Wait a minute," Bob interjected. "Hook me up to the internet. There's something I need to look up." After Butters connected him to a computer, Bob started muttering to himself. "Let's see... Talbot, Glenn. Colonel, US Air Force. Parents... grandparents... uh-oh."

"What's the problem, Bob?" Will asked.

"Glenn Talbot is the great-grandson of Major Archibald Talbot of the British Army."

"And this is important, why?" Murphy inquired.

"Because back in 1917, Major Talbot somehow pissed off someone on the spooky side, who cursed him and all his descendants. Ever since then, whenever a Talbot has ended up crossing paths with any kind of ghoul, goblin, vampire, or other monster, the Talbot has inevitably ended up being the first item on the menu. Dresden and I ran into this curse shortly after the loup-garou incident. He barely managed to save two kids out of a family of seven. Dresden broke the curse on the survivors, but this Talbot's descended from a different son of the Major than the branch in Boone Hill. It's possible that the Colonel wasn't closely related enough to have been effected by the counterspell. If that's the case..."

"Then anything falling under our jurisdiction that turns up in town this week will be trying to kill him. Terrific. Alright, let me dial up Pizza Spress. I'll see if I can get Toot-toot's people to keep an eye on the Colonel for us. In the meantime, we need to start hiding anything SHIELD related in case he wants to try looking around."

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Colonel Glenn Talbot (Who would be a General as soon as Congress signed off on the latest bill about flag promotions) sat back in his seat as he was driven to the police precinct. "Is the local police likely to give us any grief over our taking over the Barone investigation?" He growled.

"I don't think so, sir." His aide replied. "It looks like they're about ready to declare their side of the investigation closed. When I talked with them last night it seemed that the only things they want from us before handing over what they have is a copy of Barone's death certificate so that they can officially state that their suspect is dead and have someone fill out some forms to ensure that chain of custody is maintained on their evidence. It shouldn't take me more than an hour to clear all the red tape."

"Good." Talbot didn't have the slightest idea what the connection was between an attempt to desecrate America's most hallowed ground and a bunch of dead bodies in Chicago's undercity, but he was going to find out. He probably could have gotten some answers out of some of the people who took down Barone, but they all left military custody before they could be properly debriefed thanks to a series of staggeringly unlikely coincidences - which he only considered to be coincidence because there was no way they could have been engineered by any means short of divine intervention. The only one he definitively knew the identity of was Barton, and his status as a hero of the Chitauri invasion made him bulletproof.

He had been having mixed success with his mission. He had had considerable success in securing all of SHIELD's public and semi-secret assets, which was the main reason he was now up for promotion. Then things had started going wrong. He had taken the Providence Base in Canada, but everyone there managed to escape. He had failed to stop a HYDRA attempt to kidnap several flag officers - which ultimately was thwarted by SHIELD agents he had been unable to catch. He still wasn't quite sure what the tape recorder left on the grave of a retired SHIELD agent killed during the HYDRA uprising was about. At least he had been making some progress acting on the intelligence gathered from a captured HYDRA agent after one of the people brought in for his role with the tape recorder incident somehow managed to utterly break the man using a sound system, a well, some stage makeup, and a bowl of soup. Talbot was tired of setbacks. He was going to get to the bottom of what Barone had been up to and use it to unravel as much of HYDRA as he could.

Talbot was so busy thinking about the tasks that were immediately at hand that he didn't take the time to look out the window and enjoy the scenery. If he had, he might have noticed a wake in the river his car was driving alongside. A wake that was easily pacing his car.

\-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Upon reaching the police station, Talbot set his aide to taking care of the paperwork while he went to speak with the officer in charge of the investigation. Looking at the piece of cardboard with the officer's name written on it on the man's office door rather than a proper nameplate, Talbot surmised that the man wasn't highly regarded within the department.

Sergeant Rawlins rose from his desk as the Colonel entered. "Colonel Talbot?" He asked. "I've been expecting you."

Talbot went straight to business. "What can you tell me about Samuel Barone?"

"A few days ago we got an anonymous tip about a warehouse he was renting. The officer we sent to follow up discovered that the building had been recently broken into - probably by whoever sent in the tip - so he went in. When he found all the dead bodies in the basement, we launched a full investigation.

"From what we can tell, somebody had been kidnapping people, interrogating them, and dumping the bodies in the undercity. Since the oldest of the bodies had been killed maybe a day after Barone signed the lease, we tagged him as our primary suspect and sent out a BOLO. Then we got the news that he'd been killed in Virginia."

Talbot's eyes narrowed. "And how exactly did all these people manage to get kidnapped without anyone noticing until some thief stumbled onto their graves?"

"Do you have any idea how many people go missing in a city the size of Chicago every year, Colonel? Hundreds. And most of them turn out to have fairly innocuous explanations behind them, like a husband who didn't come home to his wife because he spent the night with his secretary in a motel. And there was absolutely no connection between any of the people we found in that basement. We couldn't even find proof that any of them had ever met each other before being kidnapped."

"Do you have a list of who was kidnapped and what he was questioning them about?"

"There's a list of all the people we were able to identify in the case file. We also managed to find a stack of interrogation transcripts at the crime scene. We weren't able to find any connections between the victims or the things they were questioned about, but if this Barone really was working for HYDRA, it's possible there wasn't any to find. They could have had him gathering information for a half a dozen totally unrelated plots. We also found a journal filled with insane rants about being a master of the dead and a road map that we've since identified as being of Arlington County."

Talbot's lips curled up in a predatory smile. "We'll taking custody of the evidence you've gathered, Sergeant. The CPD might not have been able to get anything out of it, but the DIA has a lot more resources. With a little luck we'll be able to figure out what they're planning to hit with enough lead time to have a company of Marines waiting for them when they arrive."

Rawlins returned the smile. "Good luck with that, Colonel."

\------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sergeant Rawlins watched the Colonel leave his office and meet up with his aide, who presumably had all the files from the Barone case packed in his briefcase. As they left, his cellphone vibrated. Rawlins looked at it and saw he had just gotten a text from an unknown number.

TALBOT IN DANGER

Even though Rawlins didn't recognize the number, he knew who had sent it. It was the same person who had tipped him off about Barone's charnel pit and all the slavery rings that had popped up lately. Murphy might have been forced out of the CPD by a dirty cop in IA, but she was still doing the job. And if she was sending him a warning, it meant that the Colonel was in trouble right now. He hurried after his visitor.

It was obvious what the danger was the moment he made it outside. Standing in the road was a man. Or something approximately man-shaped, at least. It had grey skin, and flukes like the dorsal fin of a shark protruded from its spine. The lumps on its skintight black and yellow bodysuit pulsed as it scanned for its target. As its enormous red eyes focused on its prey, it opened its mouth to reveal more teeth than a human mouth could hold, all of them sharklike.

"TALBOT!" It bellowed as it charged.

The two soldiers reacted immediately. Drawing their guns, they immediately opened fire on the shark man, with Rawlins not far behind. The bullets barely slowed the thing down. It wasn't bulletproof, but it was apparently tough enough that they didn't penetrate far enough to do much damage. Rawlin's mind turned back to some of the many lectures that Dresden had given while examining the evidence from some of their stranger cases. At one point he had mentioned that some things were more vulnerable to cold iron than hot lead. He'd gotten into the habit of keeping one reload of steel-jacketed bullets around for emergencies.

It took a handful of seconds for him to change magazines in his sidearm. Those seconds were all it took for the monster to close. Talbot's aide interposed himself between the creature and his commanding officer, a selfless act which simply forced it to go through him. The thing's teeth looked like a shark, and they were apparently sharp like them, too. The man found himself picked up by the neck with his enemy's teeth and thrown several feet. Then it turned upon its true target.

Gunfire rang out as Rawlins finished switching out his ammunition and resumed shooting. The new bullets performed far better than the old ones did. The beast staggered, howling in pain. Taking advantage of the distraction, Talbot snatched up the briefcase from where his aide had dropped it in his death throes and ran for his car. The shark man tried to chase after him, and did succeed in ripping off the car's rear bumper before it sped away. Tossing the mangled metal aside, the monster ran off in pursuit.

Rawlins lowered his gun. He was out of steel-jacketed bullets, and while he was certain it could be caught while on foot, cornering that thing would likely be about as safe as cornering a rabid wolverine.

"What was that?" Asked another officer who had been attracted to the sounds of gunplay.

"I have no idea." Rawlins admitted as he looked out across the street.

\------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Well," Murphy said. "Now we know what the Fomor will send if Octokongs won't cut it."

"Land sharks." Will muttered. "I thought they only existed in old episodes of Saturday Night Live."

"Apparently not," Butters joined in as he examined a picture of the shark man.

"Where's the Colonel now?" Will asked.

"He's currently holed up at Naval Station Great Lakes." Murphy said. "Under normal circumstances, that might be a good place to defend - it's the only military base in the Chicago area. Unfortunately, when the person trying to kill you is amphibious, the last place you want to hide is someplace with a beach. Sooner or later the land shark is going to show up to deliver a candygram."

"And we can't warn the Colonel about this without inviting a lot of awkward questions about how we know this." Daniel said.

"Not to mention that this thing appears to be very hard to take down. Superhuman strength, and while it wasn't bulletproof, its apparently tough enough that we'd need bigger guns than we have available to kill it."

"Actually..." Butters mused. "I think I see a weakness in this thing. Bob! Wake up. We need to mix up a potion."

\------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Talbot opened up his aide's bloodstained briefcase and removed a thick folder.

"I want everything in here scanned and sent to DIA headquarter, stat!" He ordered. The clerk he was yelling at saluted and hurriedly got to work.

Talbot didn't know what was in those captured files, but whatever it was, it had to have been something good for HYDRA to go through such efforts to stop him from getting them. It also meant that he was doing enough damage to them for him to be considered a threat. Good.

As the papers were scanned, Talbot picked up the ones the clerk was done with and started looking through him. There was the map of Arlington, as the sergeant mentioned. That confirmed that this was connected to the cemetery attack. Nice to know. Unfortunately, none of the interrogation transcripts provided enough context to know what Barone or his superiors were planning to do with the information gathered, at least not by themselves. Maybe the analysts would be able to find something once they cross-referenced these with the take from some of his previous operations.

Talbot set aside the transcripts and picked up the crime scene report. Description of where the bodies were found, strange ash all over the floor, crude homemade radios, two dozen refrigerators with traces of human DNA in them, none of which matched any of the bodies... This Barone must have been a very strange person.

After that came a series of autopsy reports on the victims. These appeared to be fairly straightforward, though Barone must have been a genius interrogator judging by the times of deaths. Some of these people had apparently died within an hour or so of their last being seen alive. Wait a minute...

Half of the autopsy reports were done by a M.E. by the name of Waldo Butters. One of the people reported at the incident at Arlington was a medical examiner by the name of Butters. That seemed a bit unlikely to be a coincidence.

Returning the papers to the stack, Colonel Talbot left to make a few phone calls.

\-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Butters wasn't sure why he had been called to Naval Station Great Lakes, and now that he was there, he wasn't exactly sure what he could do next. He didn't dare bring Fidellachius with him, or Bob. The same went for most of the magical devices he had invented, many of which he couldn't actually use without Bob around anyway. That just left him with the potion he and Bob had mixed up, and he really hoped that nobody asked him for a sip of his 'lemonade'. Drinking the contents of that Snapple bottle he was carrying would likely be horrifically fatal.

And that was without the problem of convincing Talbot that the land shark would be coming again. From what Murphy had said about the man, he wasn't the type to believe in certain unpleasant truths like the existence of a hidden world that even SHIELD had failed to notice and that a being from that world had cursed his family a century previous. Not to mention the basic fact that trying to explain about the Fomor would invite questions about how he knew about them, which would ultimately lead to the Colonel either digging into the Brighter Future Society or sending him to the insane asylum for another mandatory observation period.

Circumstances intervened before the interview could begin, rendering his problems a moot point.

\-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Two men looked out over the lake. Guarding the station's docks and boats was a dull job, but it had to be done. It didn't matter that unless it was sent by Canada (Which hadn't been hostile to the US since before it gained independence, though there was currently some tensions about some Air Force Colonel running an operation in their territory without telling them first) or gone through the St Lawrence Channel (Which would mean that everyone would have known it was coming for a week by now), no foreign nation could even attempt to get a ship to Chicago was irrelevant. The watch had to be maintained, especially at a training facility. The next generation of the country's sailors would be learning from their example, so they had to set a good one.

One of them noticed some motion in the distance. He raised his binoculars to get a better look.

"Joe?" The man asked.

"Yeah, Frank?" The other replied.

"It looks like there's something out there. Looks kind of like a shark fin."

"A shark fin? In Lake Michigan? That's ridiculous. You don't find sharks in the Great Lakes. " Joe scoffed.

"I know, but that's what it looks like."

"Come on! Even if a shark found its way into the St Lawrence, it would have died before reaching the Erie Canal, much less Lake Michigan. Sharks are saltwater fish. They can't survive in freshwater lakes."

"It doesn't just look like a shark fin, its also moving this way." Frank did a double-take. "There's no way anything natural could be moving that fast. Think we should call this in?"

Joe never got a chance to respond. The shark fin erupted from the water, revealing itself to be on the back of the shark-like monster that savaged him the moment its feet hit the dock.

Frank didn't hesitate. He grabbed his radio and started calling in. "Post Five! Post Five! We are under attack! I repeat, we aaaAARGH!"

Frank didn't get a chance to repeat his message.

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Butters had just parked his car when the alarms started going off. Upon entering the building he was supposed to report to, he immediately found himself with an escort.

"What's going on?" He asked.

"The station is under attack," The escort said. "We'll need you to stay someplace secure until we get the all clear. I'm afraid whatever business you had here will have to wait."

Butters was taken to a guarded interior office. He wasn't the only one there. Several officers were also waiting there. The ME wasn't exactly versed in military uniform protocol, but several of them looked like they weren't Navy uniforms.

"Wait here, Dr. Butters. We'll let you know when it's safe to leave." With that, the escort left.

"Butters, is it?" Inquired a middle aged man in one of the different uniforms. "I'm Colonel Talbot. Glad to see you could make it."

"Not a problem, Colonel," Butters said. "May I ask what the Air Force needs with a middle aged medical examiner?"

"I believe that you recently examined some bodies that were allegedly killed by a Samuel Barone. The Department of Defense believes that Barone was involved in matters that represented a potential threat to national security when he died. As such, there are a few things I'd like to ask you about that case."

And so Butters found himself answering questions about Barone's operations in Chicago. The hard part was not letting on about the fact that he was one of the people responsible for the police finding out about them.

"I'm sorry, Colonel." Butters said after a particularly loud alarm drowned out most of one of his questions. "Could you repeat that last question?"

"I said, where were you on the night Barone died?"

After asking the Colonel what night that was, Butters said "I spent the night with my girlfriend Andi. Why?"

 

"Because a man named Butters, who claimed to be a medical examiner, was present when he died. I don't suppose you would know anything about that?" Talbot inquired suspiciously.

Butters flinched at a particularly painful blare from the alarms, then hurriedly came up with a way to divert the other man's suspicions. "Are you saying I was in Virginia that night? That's not possible. I had shifts the nights before and after Barone died. And my boss hates me - if I'd missed either shift, he'd have fired me on the spot. And I haven't been on a train or plane in years. Unless there's some other way to get halfway across the country and back in a day and a half, there's no way it could have been me."

Talbot looked disappointed that his theory was so easily disproved. Changing topics, he asked "Some of Barone's papers indicated that he thought he could control the dead. Did you see anything that might be connected to that?"

Butters laughed. "Necromancy? The last time Chicago had anything connected to that was nearly ten years ago. One Halloween someone broke into the Natural History Museum and stole two saddles and a dinosaur skeleton. They were all retrieved halfway across town the following morning. The Midwest Arcane said that the only logical explanation was that two necromancers resurrected Sue the Tyrannosaurus Rex and took her for a joyride." He shrugged. "Tabloids. What can I say?" The Colonel smirked in agreement.

Then a guard burst into the room. "We need to move everybody, now!"

"What's happening?" Talbot demanded.

"The attacker appears to be after you, sir. It's heading this way. We need to get you and the others away while we break some heavier weaponry out of the armory."

The group was lead outside. As they traveled alongside a sidewalk that had been torn up in preparation for repaving, a scream rent the air. They all turned to see the land shark mangling another victim. The creature then sniffed the air and turned towards them.

"I smell the blood of the Talbots." It charged.

Talbot may have spent most of his career flying a desk rather than a plane, but that didn't mean that he was soft. His gun was out and firing before his attacker had taken two steps. Several others joined him.

Butters looked around. The potion he had brought with him should be able to disable the Fomor creature's suit, weakening it enough to be beaten, but how was he to use it without people seeing him use a magic potion? His eyes eventually settled on a forklift carrying a pallet of powdered cement, obviously intended for repaving the sidewalk. Wedging the potion bottle between two of the heavy bags, he fired up the engine.

"Hey, land shark!" Sir Waldo Butters, Knight of the Cross yelled at the monster as it was about to maim another victim. "CANDYGRAM!"

The forklift couldn't go all that fast, but it had enough momentum behind it to make it a threat. It knocked the creature back, forcing it to drop its latest victim as it was buried in a cloud of cement dust. Butters jumped out of the forklift before the impact, and took advantage of the Fomor servitor's distraction to drag the wounded man clear and start applying first aid.

As he tied up the last bandage and got up to move to one of the other wounded, Butters saw that the potion had worked. The lumps on the creature's suit were no longer pulsing. It was breathing far more heavily, and moving much more slowly. Seeing its sudden weakness as easily as Butters did, the soldiers redoubled their efforts. Finally the creature fell to the ground.

As Butters tied a tourniquet around a man's mangled arm, Talbot walked over to his enemy. "You wanted me so badly? Here I am." Then he put a bullet through its eye.

Butters continued to do what he could for the wounded until ambulances arrived to take over that problem. Then Talbot approached him.

"Butters? You're supposed to be a coroner. I want you to take that thing apart and tell me what the hell it was." He ordered.

Butters nodded. "Let me make a call to my boss to explain first, and I'll get right on it."

\------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A couple of hours later, Butters presented a recording of the autopsy and his report to the Colonel and the Captain in charge of the Naval Station.

"The deceased was someone who was either modified to the point where he can no longer be considered a human being, or was never human to begin with." He began.

"Are you talking surgery?" Talbot asked.

"Not possible," He shook his head. "To change a human into something like this would require so many operations that the body would be a solid mass of scar tissue. This is either a case of genetic modification or a member of a totally unknown species. I can't say which.

"The most obvious difference from a human being is that the deceased had a second respiratory system, which was centered around its gills. This is actually the reason why it had such trouble breathing after I hit it with the forklift."

"How is that?"

"The lumps in the suit it was wearing were miniature pumps. The suit as a whole was intended to keep water flowing through its wearer's gills. After the impact, the cement dust," along with the potion he had added to the pallet for that purpose "Got into the suit through damaged parts, and turned the water being pumped around into semi-solid gunk that jammed the pumps. The creature was forced to breathe with its lungs alone, and it couldn't adapt to that fast enough to prevent it from getting killed. It would have been similar to what somebody who lives on a coastal plain and then moved to the Rockies would go through until they adjusted to the thinner air."

Talbot nodded, noting down a weakness for future exploitation if he ran into another one of the things.

"In addition to the gills, the subjects musculature and skeletal structure were significantly enhanced." Butters continued. "It was probably designed or evolved to help it withstand water pressure while diving, but having internals strong enough to survive being under an estimated maximum of more than a mile underwater indefinitely made its body dense enough to account for its enormous strength, as well as its considerable durability. It would probably have trouble handling extreme temperatures, though - its body is optimized for retaining body heat in the ocean depths, not getting rid of it.

"Overall, there's only two possibilities for the deceased's origins. Bioengineering, or new species."

"And which is your preference?" The captain inquired.

"Both have problems associated with them. If this was the result of genetic engineering, then somebody out there is leagues ahead of anything that's been published in any medical journal that I've ever heard of. But if this is a new species, it invites two questions. Why has nobody seen one this side of Splattercon before now? And why would a new species care about the Colonel?" Butters knew exactly why that might be, but it wouldn't be an explanation either of his listeners would believe, "The first can be waved away by claiming that they only recently developed the suits, and didn't want to spend much time on the surface without them. The second I can't answer."

"It seems more likely that an enemy of the Colonel's knows someone who can make monsters than some race of monsters that the Colonel's never heard of deciding that he's an enemy." The captain mused.

Colonel Talbot immediately seized on that. "Dr Butters, is there a chance that this creature could have been made by HYDRA?"

Butters knew the answer was no, but couldn't explain why, so he did his best to answer it the way someone who didn't know about the Fomor would. "To make changes as massive as these, you'd need three things. The first is access to knowledge about gene splicing leagues in advance of what is known to anyone openly working in the field. The second is access to a great deal of money, and the third is a facility to do such work in total secrecy. HYDRA would definitely have the latter two. I can't speak for the first, but it's possible."

Taking the maybe as a yes, the Colonel continued. "How many more of them are there?"

"There's no way of telling that without more information. Obviously, if you can make one of something, you can always make more if you have the resources. What resources you'd need to make a land shark and how much of them are available are things I honestly don't know."

"You said these are amphibious. How fast could they travel underwater?" The captain asked.

"Given how muscled the thing is, I wouldn't be surprised if it could top forty miles an hour in a sprint. I'm not sure how long it could sustain that, though."

"That's not good," Seeing Talbot's inquiring glance, the captain continued. "That's faster than anything in the fleet. You saw how much damage one of these could do, and if Butters hadn't accidentally found a way to cripple it, the body count would have been much worse. A squad of these could catch up to a destroyer, board it, and possibly overwhelm the crew. At the very least they'd be able to cause enough havoc to ensure that they couldn't support whatever mission they'd be on."

"Captain, why don't you write up a list of ways these creatures could be used in an attack?" Talbot suggested. "Once you have that, I can set up a task force to work out ways to counter them."

"I'll do that. In the meantime, I think I'll schedule some oceanographic survey exercises. Our late friend was probably living in or near the lake. Let's see if we can find out where."

"Good idea. Doctor Butters?" The ME looked at the Colonel. "You saved the lives of a couple good men out there today, helped take down the thing that killed several more, and provided a very useful brief without wasting our time with nonsense about how shark men are clearly impossible when we've just killed one. Nice work. If your boss ever gets that excuse he wants to fire you, I'm sure that the military can find a use for you."

"I'll keep that in mind, Colonel."

\------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Two figures chatted in the virtual world of Uru.

BlackCat: Apparently, the land shark was supposed to be the muscle for a new Fomor incursion before it got the urge to go Talbot hunting. Because it gave the game away early, my people were able to contain the incursion before they were able to start grabbing victims. 

Lazarus: At least one good thing came out of that thing's rampage.

BlackCat: Possibly more than one, Director. The Navy now knows about the Fomor, even if they think they work for HYDRA. Sooner or later their surveys of Lake Michigan will find the Fomor capital, and then they'll likely break out the depth charges that you weren't able to give us.

Lazarus: How long do you think it will take for the Navy to contain them?

BlackCat: Quite a while. The Fomor have been bothering practically every coastal city on the map around the world. Once they start their war against the Fomor, it's likely to drag on for years unless they can pinpoint and destroy their cities. But unlike us, they actually have the ability to take the offensive on that front, rather than simply forcing a stalemate.

Lazarus: Which basically means that the Navy will be busy with the Fomor for the foreseeable future, and leaving us alone.

BlackCat: And if the Navy can take some of the pressure off of us, we can start tracking down other threats. The one thing I'm worried about is that Talbot is still cursed. We might have taken down one threat, but sooner or later he or one of his children will end up driving across a troll bridge or something, and the whole mess will start all over again.

Lazarus: Unfortunately, Agent Murphy, even if somebody could get him to believe that he's in danger from the supernatural, he definitely wouldn't accept such a warning from anyone connected to SHIELD. Until we can find a way to warn him that he'd believe, we'll just have to keep an eye on him. It's not like we don't have to do that anyway. Could you have Butters do that for us? Having an agent on his staff would be very useful.

BlackCat: I'm afraid Butters never officially signed up with SHIELD like the others did - he wasn't sure if it would be compatible with his duties as Knight of the Cross. In any case, even if he decides to take Talbot's offer, I doubt he'd consider spying on his ostensible employer to be appropriate behavior for the Knight of Faith.

Lazarus: Darn. Now, before you leave, I've received word that HYDRA is trying to secure a number of artifacts that SHIELD collected over the years and were never able to figure out the purpose of. I'd like your people to see if the paranormal world has any information about some of these old 0-8-4s that those of us in the normal world couldn't find...

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A/N: The villain this time was inspired by Tiger Shark, an enemy of Namor the Sub-Mariner. The canon Tiger Shark was a human who was turned into a humanoid shark by a genetic engineering experiment gone wrong. I modified him to be one of the Fomor races.

The Talbot curse came from the Dresden Files graphic novel Ghoul Goblin. If you want to know what caused the curse, Major Talbot decided that his rank allowed him to cut the line for a table at a cafe in Cairo, and that his being British meant that he could summarily evict some locals from their table so he could be served. At least one of the people at that table wasn't really Egyptian (Or even human), and cursed his bloodline. He and his heirs started dying in unlikely accidents shortly thereafter. Unfortunately, there's no real way to explain the curse to Talbot without inducting him into the spooky side, so even though this attack is over, the curse is still there.

Murphy's handle of BlackCat doesn't come from the Marvel character. Her father used to be a member of a unit of the CPD known as the Black Cats, which was the predecessor to the Special Investigations unit that she once commanded. The origin of Coulson's handle should be obvious.


End file.
